Reuters Health News Summary

Following is a summary of current health news briefs. Gilead teams up with insitro for experimental NASH treatments

Gilead Sciences Inc said on Tuesday it will partner with privately held insitro to develop therapies for a fatty liver disease called non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), as the drugmaker tries to overcome its recent setback in developing NASH treatments. Insitro will receive an upfront payment of $15 million with additional near-term payments up to $35 million based on operational milestones, the companies said in a statement. Financial scam victims have higher risk of Alzheimer's

Older adults who are victims of financial scams may be more likely to develop dementia and Alzheimer's disease than elderly people who don't get tricked by scammers, a small U.S. study suggests. For the study, researchers gave scam awareness questionnaires to 935 older people who didn't have dementia. Five questions assessed how open people were to sales pitches, how interested they were in potentially risky investments, and whether they understood that elderly people are more vulnerable to scams. China urges large pig farms to test for African swine fever

China will allow large-scale pig farms and breeding farms to test for African swine fever in a bid to help early detection of the disease, overturning an earlier prohibition on commercial firms carrying out their own testing. The agriculture ministry has asked local husbandry bureaus to encourage large farms to obtain testing kits for the deadly virus that has swept through the country, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs said on its website on Tuesday. Amgen sets $21,900 annual price for new Evenity bone drug

Amgen Inc on Monday set the U.S. list price for its new Evenity osteoporosis drug at $1,825 a month, or $21,900 for a full 12-month course of injections. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration last week approved bone-building Evenity for postmenopausal women who are at high risk of fracture, but required the label to have a boxed warning, the FDA’s strictest, flagging increased risk of heart attack, stroke and cardiovascular-related death. Cholera cases rise in Kenya's capital, top hospital says

The Kenyan capital has experienced a jump in cholera cases, one of the city's top hospitals said on Tuesday, adding that eight of its own staff had been infected by the disease. "There is an upsurge of cholera cases in the county of Nairobi. We have had several cases admitted in our hospital. Unfortunately we had 8 staff affected," The Nairobi Hospital, which is private, said in a statement. Cannabis users may need more anesthesia for surgery

People who regularly use cannabis may need more than twice the usual dose of anesthesia for surgery, a U.S. study suggests. As a growing number of U.S. states legalize marijuana for medical and recreational use, more patients who use the drug are showing up in operating rooms across the country. To get a clearer picture of how cannabis impacts the effectiveness of different types of anesthesia, researchers studied 250 patients who had minimally invasive procedures requiring anesthesia in Colorado, where recreational marijuana use is legal. U.S. Supreme Court rejects Allergan bid to use tribe to shield drug patents

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday cast aside pharmaceutical company Allergan Plc's unorthodox bid to shield patents from a federal administrative court's review by transferring them to a Native American tribe. The justices left in place a lower court ruling upholding the authority of a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office tribunal to decide the validity of patents covering Allergan's dry eye drug Restasis, refusing to hear the company's appeal. Allergan had argued that the tribe's sovereign status under federal law made the patents immune from administrative review by the agency. New 'added sugars' labeling could save money and improve health

The Food and Drug Administration's new mandatory rules requiring labels on all packaged foods and drinks to indicate the presence of so-called added sugars could have substantial health and cost saving benefits in the United States over the next two decades, a new study suggests. Using a computer model, researchers determined that the labeling policy, which is set to go into effect between 2020 and 2021, might prevent nearly 1 million cases of heart disease and diabetes, according to the report published in Circulation. First-year trainee doctors spend little time on patient care

Over a typical 24-hour shift, first year residents training in internal medicine spend just three hours on direct patient care and only 1.8 hours on education, a U.S. study suggests. Most of their time - an average of 15.9 hours out of every 24-hour shift - is consumed instead by "indirect patient care," primarily involving interactions with medical records and documentation, the study found. U.S. measles cases surge nearly 20 percent in early April, CDC says

The number of confirmed cases of measles in the United States this year jumped by nearly 20 percent in the week ended April 11, in the country's second-worst outbreak in nearly two decades, federal health officials reported on Monday. As of April 11, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recorded 555 cases of the disease since the beginning of the year, up from 465 cases confirmed by April 4. The cases were found in 20 states spanning the country.