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Beshear’s Medical Cannabis Advisory Committee finds massive support for legalizing medical marijuana; drug officers opposed
BY MELISSA PATRICK KENTUCKY HEALTH NEWS An advisory committee appointed by Gov. Andy Beshear reported that most Kentuckians who submitted online comments support legalizing the medical use of marijuana, or cannabis, and that no one spoke against it at the four town-hall meetings the committee held across the state in July. “Polling suggests 90 percent…
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Two Kentucky hospitals, in Lexington and Prestonsburg, each lose $2.4 million in very different lawsuits over ‘patient dumping’
Case tried by District Judge Claria Horn Two Kentucky hospitals have recently lost lawsuits that charged them with “patient dumping,” generally defined as discharging patients who are uninsured or unable to pay – or refusing to admit them in the first place, reports Andrew Wolfson of the Louisville Courier Journal. The judgments were virtually the…
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Doctors back booster shots for recent COVID-19 variants
BY AL CROSS KENTUCKY HEALTH NEWS Kentucky experts largely dismissed concerns about speedy approval of the new coronavirus vaccines on “Kentucky Tonight,” a Kentucky Educational Television program, Monday night. Ilhem Messaoudi, chair of microbiology at the University of Kentucky, said she has been surprised at people who she said are “up in arms” about the…
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COVID-19 map shows 41 counties with less risk than last week, but Eastern Coal Field remains almost fully high-risk
BY AL CROSSKENTUCKY HEALTH NEWS The weekly COVID-19 risk map for Kentucky took a solid turn for the better Thursday, as more than a third of the state’s counties had a lower risk level than a week earlier. Only two counties, Barren and Trigg, showed a higher level of risk on the three-level scale of…
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CDC says 108 counties have elevated COVID-19 risk
Beshear urges use of new booster vaccine BY MELISSA PATRICKKENTUCKY HEALTH NEWS The pandemic in Kentucky remains on a rough plateau, but it’s a high plateau. Seventy of Kentucky’s 120 counties have a high level of COVID-19 risk and 38 have a medium level, with very little change in the last two weeks, according to…
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Kentucky has 82 syringe exchange programs in 63 counties
State drug-control official says ‘That’s not enough’ BY MELISSA PATRICK KENTUCKY HEALTH NEWS Kentucky still has more syringe service programs than any other state, but 57 counties still don’t have one, including 21 of the 54 that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers vulnerable to a rapid outbreak of HIV or hepatitis C…
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CDC risk map shows 93 percent of Kentucky counties with high or medium risk of COVID-19 infection
BY MELISSA PATRICK KENTUCKY HEALTH NEWS Kentuckians in general have about the same risk of catching COVID-19 as they did a week ago, with 93 percent of the state’s counties at a high or medium risk of transmission and The New York Times ranking Kentucky second among the states for new coronavirus cases in the…
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FDA OKs updated COVID-19 booster targeting latest Omicron subvariants; Beshear says it could be available in Kentucky next week
BY MELISSA PATRICK KENTUCKY HEALTH NEWS The new, updated COVID-19 booster shots that target the original strain of the coronavirus and major Omicron subvariants could be available to Kentuckians as early as next week, Gov. Andy Beshear said Wednesday. The Food and Drug Administration authorized the updated booster shots from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech on Aug.…
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Monkeypox cases in Kentucky remain low, but keep inching up slowly; vaccine is available for those at high risk of getting the disease
BY MELISSA PATRICK KENTUCKY HEALTH NEWS Even as new cases of monkeypox inch up in Kentucky, overall cases remain low. On Sunday, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had confirmed 19,962 cases nationwide, 33 had been confirmed in the state. That’s two more than had been reported by Thursday when the state put…
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In 2020, Kentucky’s life expectancy fell by 2 years
KENTUCKY HEALTH NEWS One of the most striking measures of the pandemic is the decline in life expectancy from 2019 to 2020, the year the novel coronavirus hit; it declined more in Kentucky than it did in most other states. Nationally, life expectancy declined from 78.8 years in 2019 to 77 in 2020, a drop…
Tag: Kentucky Health News
