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** 7 November 2022
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** UK
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** Rishi Sunak hires health adviser (#1)
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** International
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** Philip Morris wins Elliott’s backing for $15.7bn Swedish Match takeover (#3)
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** Alcohol death toll is growing, US government reports say (#4)
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** UK
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** Rishi Sunak hires health adviser
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**
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** Bill Morgan, who advised former health secretary Andrew Lansley for two years from 2010 and has since worked in health policy and communications consultancy, is to return to government as Downing Street’s top political health aide. The move follows a brief stint as Steve Barclay’s special political adviser during his time as health and social care secretary over the summer.

Morgan, who is also currently a King’s Fund visiting fellow, wrote in September that there is “too much friction” between NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care and that the health service’s focus on delivery has “withered away”. He suggested moving NHSE’s leaders into the same building as ministers.

Morgan will work as part of the Number 10 policy unit, which is led by Eleanor Shawcross, an adviser to George Osborne as chancellor. The Number 10 delivery unit, part of the civil service and led by former NHSE director Emily Lawson, will remain in place, and Ninjeri Pandit, previously head of office for Simon Stevens at NHS England, remains health policy and delivery lead.

At the DHSC, Barclay has hired a five-strong team of special political advisers. They include chief of staff Iain Carter, who ran Liz Truss’ leadership campaign and then served as director of political strategy at Number 10. Also moving to the department are Policy Exchange’s head of health and social care Robert Ede, former Daily Express political editor Macer Hall, public affairs consultant Lionel Zetter, and former journalist and Conservative councillor Clarence Mitchell.

The confirmed DHSC ministerial team is made up of Will Quince, with responsibility for health and secondary care, and Helen Whately, who returns to the social care role. Under them are junior ministers Neil O’Brien, who covers primary care and public health, and former nurse Maria Caulfield, in charge of mental health and the women’s health strategy.

Charity and business leader Nick Markham will represent the department in the House of Lords.

Source: Health Services Journal, 4 November 2022

See also: Morgan’s Times article - The NHS needs major structural change, but there’s cause for optimism ([link removed])
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** International
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** Philip Morris wins Elliott’s backing for $15.7bn Swedish Match takeover
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**
Elliott Management, the biggest shareholder in Swedish Match, has decided to back Philip Morris’s $15.7bn offer, putting completion of the deal within reach, reports suggest. PMI’s offer had received more than 80% of shareholder acceptances, as of the latest count on Friday, and more may be processed. Handelsbanken, the Swedish bank, is acting as the receiving agent.

The Marlboro maker first bid for Swedish Match in May, but the takeover bid was complicated when arbitrage funds and activist hedge funds bought up the stock, forcing PMI to up its offer from SKr106 ($9.63) to SKr116 per share last month to sweeten the deal. Under strict Swedish takeover rules, PMI had made its offer conditional on achieving more than 90% of shareholder acceptances by a deadline of November 4, but PMI also reserves the right to complete the offer at a lower level of acceptances. Elliott, which as the biggest shareholder was the effective kingmaker of the deal, had decided to tender its 10.5% stake, pushing shareholder acceptances above 80% and clearing the path to the takeover.

If PMI succeeds in the Swedish Match takeover, it will not only add Swedish Match’s Zyn product, which has more than a 60% share of the US nicotine pouch market, to its portfolio but it will also be able to use the product’s retail distribution channels to sell its IQOS heated tobacco sticks throughout the US.

Source: Financial Times, 6 November 2022
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** Alcohol death toll is growing, US government reports say
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The rate of deaths that can be directly attributed to alcohol rose nearly 30% in the US during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to new government data. The Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had already said the overall number of such deaths rose in 2020 and 2021. Two reports from the CDC this week provided further details on which groups have the highest death rates and which states are seeing the largest numbers.

Marissa Esser, who leads the CDC’s alcohol program noted: “Alcohol is often overlooked” as a public health problem, “but it is a leading preventable cause of death.”

The first report focused on more than a dozen kinds of “alcohol-induced” deaths that were wholly blamed on drinking, including alcohol-caused liver or pancreas failure, alcohol poisoning, withdrawal and certain other diseases. There were more than 52,000 such deaths last year, up from 39,000 in 2019. The rate of such deaths had been increasing in the two decades before the pandemic, by 7% or less each year. In 2020, they rose 26%, to about 13 deaths per 100,000 Americans - the highest rate recorded in at least 40 years.

The second report, published in JAMA Network Open, looked at a wider range of deaths that could be linked to drinking, such as motor vehicle accidents, suicides, falls and cancers. More than 140,000 of that broader category of alcohol-related deaths occur annually, based on data from 2015 to 2019, the researchers said. CDC researchers say about 82,000 of those deaths are from drinking too much over a long period of time and 58,000 from causes tied to acute intoxication.

The study found that as many as 1 in 8 deaths among US adults ages 20 to 64 were alcohol-related deaths. New Mexico was the state with the highest percentage of alcohol-related deaths, at 22%, while Mississippi had the lowest, at 9%

Esser notes the findings point to a need to look at steps to reduce alcohol consumption, including increasing alcohol taxes and enacting measures that limit where people can buy beer, wine and liquor.

Source: Associated Press News, 4 November 2022

See also: Guardian - US alcohol deaths rose nearly 30% in first year of Covid, data shows ([link removed])
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