Health Care and Medicine

Effective June 1, the Cedar Rapids office of the Iowa Harm Reduction Coalition has closed its doors due to a major funding loss. The organization’s leadership will continue to offer deliveries and mobile services to clients.

Statewide, the number of patients in Iowa hospitals with COVID-19 reached 180 as of Wednesday, up from 139 patients last week. It’s the highest total seen since early March, but still far below the omicron variant surge in January.

An Iowa nursing home where a resident was found dead in a pool of blood last summer after a series of falls has been fined $18,000 by the state.

As families grapple with the ongoing shortage of baby formula nationwide, more parents are turning to social media groups that facilitate peer-to-peer breast milk donations.

The innovation lab at St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids helped build an adaptive keyboard for Lotus Friedman, a 13-year-old from Dubuque who was paralyzed from the waist down after a skiing accident earlier this year. The ability to play her favorite game is a reprieve from day-to-day hospital life, she said.

Work is underway to “fine tune” the COVID-19 vaccines to make them more effective against emerging variants, but a strategy scientists hope to employ includes offering flu and coronavirus boosters in a single vaccine.

Mercy Medical Center in Cedar Rapids has named Dr. Timothy Quinn as the hospital’s new president and CEO effective Jan. 1, 2023. The family medicine physician currently is executive vice president and chief of clinical operations.

HACAP Food Reservoir has partnered with area health care providers to launch Food is Medicine, a program that screens for food insecurity and provides immediate assistance to patients in need.

The state public health department has reported new COVID-19 case counts have increased again, reaching 3,847 new infections in the past seven days. Hospitalizations also continued to increase this week.

Julie Beckett fought to care for her daughter at home in the 1980s, bringing about a fundamental change to the federal Medicaid program that ultimately improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of children with complex disabilities nationwide. She died in Cedar Rapids on Friday at the age of 72.

Linn County Public Health is now offering treatment for those with hepatitis C, a liver disease that is growing in prevalence across the state. Officials are seeing a higher prevalence among those who use injection drugs, who often face barriers to care.

At the height of the pandemic, the meat processing industry worked closely with political appointees in the Trump administration to stave off health restrictions and keep slaughterhouses open even as COVID-19 spread rapidly among workers, according to a Congressional report released Thursday.