• District of Columbia: Last week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched a public inquiry into whether providers who offer gender-affirming care are violating federal consumer protection laws by not disclosing risks of the treatment or making unsubstantiated claims about its benefits. In a news release, FTC said it launched the inquiry "to better understand how consumers may have been exposed to false or unsupported claims about 'gender-affirming care', especially as it relates to minors, and to gauge the harms consumers may be experiencing." According to The Hill, the Trump administration has taken several steps to restrict gender-affirming care for minors over the last few months. In January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at ending federal support for transition care for adolescents under the age of 19. The Department of Justice also recently sent over 20 subpoenas to doctors and clinics "involved in performing transgender medical procedures on children" in investigations of "healthcare fraud, false statements, and more." Currently, around half of the country bans gender-affirming care for minors while 14 states and Washington, D.C., have "shield laws" to protect access to gender-affirming care. (Migdon, The Hill, 7/29)
• Georgia: The bird flu virus, also called H5N1, was first detected in dairy cows in March 2024, and has since spread and infected over 1,000 dairy herds in 17 states, as well as dozens of people. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, bird flu spreads primarily from contaminated milking equipment or by dairy workers and vehicles traveling between farms. However, a new preprint study identified live bird flu virus in the air of milking facilities, which suggests that cows and farmworkers could have been infected by inhaling the virus. The study also found that some infected cows had no visible symptoms of bird flu, which suggests that the virus may also spread from asymptomatic animals and could go undetected on farms. As the virus continues to spread, it has more chances to evolve and could eventually mutate to become more dangerous to humans. "We're going to have more human infections perpetually," said Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University who led the study. "It could create something that is going to be quite dangerous in a few years." (Mandavilli/Anthes, New York Times, 8/4)
• Maryland: According to the latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), binge drinking and heavy alcohol use among people ages 12 and older slightly decreased in 2024 while nicotine vaping slightly increased. In 2024, 20.1% of NSDUH respondents said they participated in binge drinking, a slight decline from the 21.7% who said the same in 2021. Similarly, the percentage of respondents who said they were "heavy" alcohol users, which is defined as binge drinking on five or more days in the past 30 days, declined from 5.7% in 2021 to 5% in 2024. When it came to vaping, 9.6% of respondents said they had vaped nicotine in the past month, up from 8.3% in 2022. Overall, 58.3% of respondents said they used tobacco, vaped nicotine, used alcohol, or used an illicit drug in the past month. The survey also asked people about their mental health. In 2024, 23.4% of adults ages 18 and older reported having any mental illness in the past year, with 5.6% saying that they had a severe mental illness. According to the survey, both percentages have largely remained the same since 2021. (Frieden, MedPage Today, 7/28)

The fight against COVID-19 has pushed healthcare to quickly adopt virtual tools at a rate much faster than normal. Some of the most promising pandemic-related health technologies go beyond just telehealth — for example, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). Read on to learn three ways AI can be used to help with future pandemics.