Lawyers for the state of Oklahoma urged a judge Monday to find health-care conglomerate Johnson & Johnson culpable for the consequences of the state’s opioid epidemic and assess the company as much as $17.5 billion to help clean up the damage.

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As their minivan rolled north, they felt their nerves kick in — but they kept on driving.

At the wheel: Lija Greenseid, a rule-abiding Minnesota mom steering her Mazda5 on a cross-border drug run.

Her daughter, who is 13, has Type 1 diabetes and needs insulin. In the United States, it can cost hundreds of dollars per vial. In Canada, you can buy it without a prescription for a tenth of that price.

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Normally, parents make decisions about their children’s health care. But when it comes to the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases and cancer, kids should have the right to protect themselves. That is why Senate Bill 3899A, which would allow teenagers, in consultation with their physicians, to receive vaccines against HPV (human papilloma virus), ought to become the law in New York.

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Because of rare illness, Louise Moorhouse is on a special diet of pills or foul-tasting shakes. There’s a drug that would allow her to eat like anyone else – she took it for three years during a clinical trial. But the NHS won’t pay for it, reports the BBC’s Deborah Cohen – and the drug company stopped giving it to her once the trial was over.

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A decades-old North Carolina law that banned women from having abortions after their 20th week of pregnancy is unconstitutional, a federal judge ruled on Monday.

The 1973 law made some allowances for medical concerns, but a 2015 amendment that narrowed those exemptions prompted abortion rights groups to file a lawsuit in 2016.

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For more than 30 years in Oregon, cases of tetanus in children were almost mythical — studied in textbooks but never seen in person — thanks to the effectiveness of pediatric vaccination programs.

That streak ended in 2017 when an unvaccinated 6-year-old boy arrived at a hospital in the state, experiencing jaw spasms and struggling to breathe, according to a new case study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The child was playing on a farm when he cut his head on something, the report said. His parents cleaned and stitched the wound at home, but alarming symptoms emerged six days later. The boy’s jaw began clenching, and his neck and back were arched — a trademark indication of tetanus called opisthotonus that is caused by involuntary muscle spasms.

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An 18-year-old from Ohio who famously inoculated himself against his mother’s wishes in December says he attributes his mother’s anti-vaccine ideology to a single source: Facebook.

Ethan Lindenberger, a high school senior, testified Tuesday before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and underscored the importance of “credible” information. In contrast, he said, the false and deep-rooted beliefs his mother held — that vaccines were dangerous — were perpetuated by social media. Specifically, he said, she turned to anti-vaccine groups on social media for evidence that supported her point of view.

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It’s only a matter of time until the first million-dollar drug arrives in a deeply dysfunctional health-care system. With the new drugs come painful questions: Who is stuck with the bill, do they have the cash to pay it and how can they avoid the obligation?

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One night in November 1999, a 26-year-old woman was raped in a parking lot in Grand Rapids, Mich. Police officers managed to get the perpetrator’s DNA from a semen sample, but it matched no one in their databases.

Detectives found no fingerprints at the scene and located no witnesses. The woman, who had been attacked from behind, could not offer a description. It looked like the rapist would never be found.

Five years later, there was a break in the case. A man serving time for another sexual offense submitted a DNA sample with his parole application. The sample matched DNA from the rape scene.

There was just one catch: The parolee had an identical twin, and standard DNA tests can’t distinguish between identical twins. Prosecutors had no additional evidence to rule out one or the other. Because they couldn’t press charges against either of the men, the case remains open nearly 20 years later.

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Vaginal mesh, used to repair and improve weakened pelvic tissues, is implanted in the vaginal wall. It was initially — in 1998 — thought to be a safe and easy solution for women suffering from stress urinary incontinence.

But over time, complications were reported, including chronic inflammation, and mesh that shrinks and becomes encased in scar tissue causing pain, infection and protrusion through the vaginal wall.

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