InnovationRx: A 31,000-Year-Old Surgery; Plus: Feds May Stop Covid Support

InnovationRx is your weekly digest of healthcare news. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here . I t’s long been known that prehistoric people performed surgeries, based on skeletons found by archaeologists.

But it turns out that surgery may have been practiced long before researchers previously thought. An article published in Nature this week describes a skeleton found of an adult that appears to have had a limb amputated as a child around 31,000 years ago. The person appears to have survived the procedure and lived perhaps as long as a decade afterward.

Prior to this, the oldest known amputation was one that happened about 7,000 years ago. And it’s long been thought that surgery didn’t start happening until after humans started settling into farming communities. But this finding in Borneo upends that timeline, suggesting that surgery and the practice of medicine may significantly pre-date agriculture, making healthcare one of the oldest professions.

CVS Health will acquire home care company Signify Health for $8 billion as retail drugstores add more primary care and in-home medical services. CVS apparently beat out other healthcare and retail companies including Amazon and UnitedHealth Group’s Optum medical care provider business that had reportedly been interested in Signify Health or at least looked into the potential of adding the home care company. Read more here.

Prescription Wearables: Medical tech company Otolith labs announced that it has raised a $20 million series A round to accelerate the development and commercialization of its prescription wearable device geared towards treating chronic vertigo. RNA Therapies: ARCH Ventures, Newpath Partners and Andreesen Horowitz have teamed up to provide the initial funding for the launch of Orbital Therapeutics , which is developing an RNA platform for the development of new drugs that can be delivered to a wide variety of cell types. Patient Platform : Upfront, which has developed a patient engagement platform, announced that it has raised a $10.

5 million series C round led by Baird Capital, Echo Health Ventures and First Trust Capital Partners. A federal judge in Texas ruled Wednesday that an employer should not have to pay for HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis pills for employees, saying it violated the Christian-owned company’s right to religious freedom . Walmart and UnitedHealth Group are rolling out a major partnership to provide healthcare services and “improve the patient experience” for Medicare Advantage enrollees in certain markets across the country.

The percentage of Americans who don’t have any health insurance has dropped to an all-time low of 8%, and actions by Congress and the Biden administration may drop that number further. N ow that the CDC has signed off on new omicron specific vaccines, it’s probably time to get ready for your yearly Covid shots to go along with the flu shots you should also be getting every year, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Now that the technology is in place, we can expect Covid shots to be geared annually towards protecting against the most predominant circulating variants. Vaccines have “caught up with the virus” for the first time since December 2020, according to Ashish Jah, White House coronavirus coordinator. Experts believe that updated boosters will provide more protection than the initial vaccine.

However, other experts are skeptical, saying that variant-specific boosters aren’t the best path. Those scientists think that the best route is a a universal Covid vaccine. No such shot like that exists yet, but there’s several being developed right now.

The federal government will stop being the predominant purchaser of Covid-19 vaccines, treatments, and tests at some point this fall. White House Covid-19 Response Team coordinator Dr Ashish Jha said his “hope is that in 2023 you’re going to see commercialization of almost all of these products. ” Read more here.

Online learning due to the pandemic has resulted in the first ever drop in math test scores and the biggest drop in reading scores since 1990, according to a report by National Association of Educational Progress. A study found that Long Covid can affect the risk of cardiovascular issues up to 12-months post infection regardless of cardiovascular health, race, or age Violence against healthcare workers has drastically increased since the start of the pandemic, with 44% of nurses reporting physical abuse since the pandemic began, and 66% reporting verbal abuse. In new findings from Brookings, it’s been found that Long Covid is keeping at least four million Americans out of work, costing them between $170 billion and $230 million a year in wages.

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As masks are shed, a routine visit to a medical office can pose Covid risks for some patients (Stat) Embryos with DNA from three people develop normally in first safety study (Nature) California congressman demands more transparency from health care sharing ministries (Religion News).