Public Health

Attorneys on behalf of Chicago filed a federal lawsuit March 6 against three of the largest opioid distributors in the U.S. for allegedly contributing to a public health crisis related to the "unfettered and unlawful distribution" of opioids in the…

Tufts Medical Center, Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital — all in Boston — are running low on injectable forms of fentanyl, morphine and hydromorphine, according to a report from the Boston Herald.

Suspected opioid overdoses seen in emergency departments across the U.S. increased by nearly 30 percent between July 2016 and September 2017, according to the CDC's March 6 Vital Signs report.

Aetna will support March For Our Lives, a rally against gun violence and mass shootings, with a $200,000 donation, the insurer's CEO Mark Bertolini wrote in a LinkedIn post.

Amazon is cutting its Prime membership fee by nearly 54 percent for Medicaid beneficiaries beginning March 6, The New York Times reports.

The Philadelphia Department of Public Health recently launched a new television ad campaign urging people to abstain from using prescription painkillers, referring to the medications as "heroin in pill form," according to WHYY.

The number of pediatric opioid overdose patients admitted to children's hospitals nearly doubled between 2004 and 2015, according to a study published in the journal Pediatrics.

Phoenix-based Abrazo Maryvale Campus, a 232-bed hospital that shuttered last December, will reopen as an emergency department and behavioral health hospital, according to AZCentral.

While some states made premiums part of their Medicaid expansion programs, few enrollees are making the payments, according to a Kaiser Health News report.

Nearly 75 percent of all psychiatric hospital admissions in Canada's Ontario province were involuntary in 2013 — an increase of nearly four times the number of these admissions in Ontario since the 1980s, according to a study published in BJPsych…