HEALTH AND SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS

July 25, 2019 (San Diego's East County) -- Our Health and Science Highlights provide cutting edge news that could impact your health and our future.

HEALTH

• New Immunotherapy Treatment Removes All Tumors In Woman With Advanced Metastatic Breast Cancer (Forbes)
• Trump administration moves to block nursing home residents’ access to courts (Public Justice)
• Faith-based health clinics to spurn birth control under Trump rule (The Hill)

SCIENCE AND TECH

• Antitrust inquiry may heighten calls to break up tech giants (Washington Post)
• Twelve years to save Earth? Make that 18 months...(BBC)
• Climate change: Current warming `unparalled’ in 2,000 years (BBC)
• FTC To Hold Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Liable For Any Future Privacy Violations (NPR) 

For excerpts and links to full stories, click “read more” and scroll down.

HEALTH

New Immunotherapy Treatment Removes All Tumors InWoman With Advanced Metastatic Breast Cancer (Forbes)

Research published today in Nature Medicine by scientists at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has described a new immunotherapy approach, which led to a complete disappearance of tumors in a woman with advanced metastatic breast cancer who only had months to live. The findings show how naturally-occurring tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) were extracted from the patient's tumor, grown outside of her body to boost their numbers and injected back into the patient to tackle the cancer. 

Trump administration moves to block nursing home residents’ access to courts (Public Justice)

Imagine that your 90-year-old mother was left unattended in a nursing home with a bed sore, acute appendicitis, and a urinary tract infection so severe that it entered her blood stream. Then imagine that you file a lawsuit, but are told you cannot have your day in court because three years ago when your mother was admitted, she signed a contract that had an arbitration clause. You are now forced to handle the matter privately, before an arbitrator that is likely biased towards the nursing home. Confidentiality provisions prevent you from informing the public…In a final rule issued on Tuesday, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) said that this scenario is fair.

Faith-based health clinics to spurn birth control under Trump rule (The Hill)

The Trump administration’s effort to reshape a decades-old, federally funded family planning program has its roots in Southern California, where one faith-based group wants to be the “pro-life” Planned Parenthood. Obria Medical Clinics, which opposes contraception and teaches abstinence, recently became the first group of its kind to receive federal funding through a family planning program established by Congress in 1970 …The changes, which take effect in September, remove requirements that providers refer women for abortions …None of the money will go toward birth control… funds will instead go toward abstinence education and a natural family planning program called Fertility Education and Medical Management (FEMM).

SCIENCE AND TECH

Antitrust inquiry may heighten calls to break up tech giants (Washington Post)

The Department of Justice on Tuesday announced it is opening a wide-ranging antitrust review of “market-leading online platforms,” an unprecedented probe of the tech industry that could heighten calls for Amazon, Facebook and Google to be broken up.

Twelve years to save Earth? Make that 18 months...(BBC)

Do you remember the good old days when we had "12 years to save the planet"? Now it seems, there's a growing consensus that the next 18 months will be critical in dealing with the global heating crisis, among other environmental challenges. 

Climate change: Current warming `unparalled’ in 2,000 years (BBC)

The speed and extent of current global warming exceeds any similar event in the past 2,000 years, researchers say. They show that famous historic events like the "Little Ice Age" don't compare with the scale of warming seen over the last century. 

FTC To Hold Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Liable ForAny Future Privacy Violations (NPR) 

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will have to personally answer to federal regulators under an agreement to settle a privacy case with the Federal Trade Commission that includes a $5 billion penalty for the giant social media company, the agency announced Wednesday. Separately, Facebook will pay $100 million to settle a case with the Securities and Exchange Commission for making misleading disclosures about the risk that users' data would be misused…Under the FTC agreement, Zuckerberg will be required to submit quarterly compliance reports …If the Facebook co-founder or "designated compliance officers" violate the agreement, they could be subject to civil and criminal penalties…