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THURSDAY, May 25, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- A federal website intended to help people choose a nursing home not only contains inaccurate information, but those inaccuracies appear to be at least partially driven by race, a new study reports.The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) established the Nursing Home Care Compare website in the 1990s to publicly report patient safety indicators for every nursing facility in the nation.But the site appears to drastically underreport the number and severity of major injury falls and bedsores suffered by Medicare residents in specific nursing homes.The site relies on self-reported data from nursing homes to track falls and bedsores, but Medicare claims data show that nursing homes are not reporting all of these incidents, said...

THURSDAY, May 25, 2023 (American Heart Association News) -- The official word on COVID-19, according to the World Health Organization and the U.S. government, is that it's no longer an emergency. But while that's a milestone, it's hardly an all-clear for everyone to behave as if the pandemic never happened, experts say."It doesn't mean there's no risk for anyone," said Dr. Preeti Malani, an infectious disease physician at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "But it does mean that we are at a very different point than we were when the emergency was declared more than three years ago."The WHO first declared "a public health emergency of international concern" on Jan. 30, 2020, when just 213 people were known to have died from COVID-19, a number that has since grown to nearly 7...

THURSDAY, May 25, 2023 (American Heart Association News) -- Alexis Simon, a special education teacher in the greater Pittsburgh area, was having a routine morning at school, sending an e-mail at her desk. The next thing she knew, she woke up at a hospital, disoriented and panicked."Is my baby OK?" Simon, who was 8 1/2 months pregnant, asked the doctors.The baby boy, Dominic, indeed was born healthy, three days after his mother's cardiac arrest in December.Simon has no underlying heart disease or other health problems, and various tests at the hospital came back normal. Doctors were baffled as to why she suddenly slumped over in her chair at Trafford Middle School."It was like someone just turned my switch off," said Simon, 29.When Simon became unconscious – thankfully, no kids were...

THURSDAY, May 25, 2023 (HealthDay News) – Robert Weymouth, 58, of Portland, Maine, died this year because of a tick bite.You've likely heard of Lyme disease and the problems it can cause when passed to a human through the bite of a deer tick. But Lyme isn’t the only tick-borne illness in the woods.Powassan virus -- a rare and untreatable infection -- is also transmitted by ticks. That's the bite that led to fatal complications in the case of this Maine truck driver.Weymouth -- the third Powassan death since 2015 in Maine and the first this year -- likely contracted the virus in the state, according to Maine's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He developed neurological symptoms and died in the hospital.His widow, Annemarie Weymouth, is now warning others about protecting...