The federal government has announced a new rule that guarantees the rights of patients and families to sue long-term care facilities.

The rule, released Wednesday by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, bans so-called pre-dispute binding arbitration clauses in nursing home contracts, which require patients and families to settle any dispute over care in arbitration, rather than through the court system.

The rule applies to facilities that receive money from Medicare or Medicaid — which is nearly all of them.

“Today’s rules are a major step forward to improve the care and safety of the nearly 1.5 million residents in the more than 15,000 long-term care facilities that participate in the Medicare and Medicaid programs,” Andy Slavitt, the acting administrator for the agency, wrote in a blog post about the decision.

It is scheduled to go into effect in November.

The change was originally proposed in July 2015, and Slavitt writes that the agency has “received and reviewed almost 10,000 comments from the public.”

The rule would address cases like that of Dean Cole, who NPR reported on in 2015. Just two weeks after Cole’s wife arranged for him to move into a Minnesota nursing home, he was rushed to the hospital, severely dehydrated and in a coma, a lawyer for the family told NPR’s Ina Jaffe.

Cole died a short while later. His wife, Virginia, could not sue the facility because she had signed a binding agreement to pursue arbitration for any dispute. Although she won the arbitration hearing before three judges, the fees for the proceedings amounted to more than $60,000, leaving her with a final settlement amount of only $20,000, her lawyer said.

The new rule will allow people like Virginia Cole to sue a nursing home in court. It also leaves the door open to arbitration in individual cases if both sides agree to it.

A 2009 study commissioned by the American Health Care Association, which represents most nursing homes, found the average awards after arbitration were 35 percent lower than if the plaintiff had gone to court.

The American Health Care Association opposed the arbitration rule change when it was proposed in 2015. Clifton Porter II, the AHCA’s senior vice president for government relations, defended arbitration in a 2015 interview with NPR, saying “it actually allows consumers to get an expedited award.”

The association’s president and CEO, Mark Parkinson, said in a statement, “AHCA is extremely disappointed that CMS included in the final rule a provision banning all pre-dispute arbitration agreements. That provision clearly exceeds CMS’s statutory authority and is wholly unnecessary to protect residents’ health and safety. We are considering the appropriate steps to take in light of this unjustified action by CMS.”

In addition to the litigation changes, the new rule also includes expanded regulations regarding the food, medical treatment and personnel requirements for long-term care facilities. Nursing homes must provide “nourishing, palatable” food for residents and develop a care plan for each resident within 48 hours of their admission to the facility.

Amid increased fears of institutionally-spread infection and antibiotic resistance, the new rules also require nursing homes to develop an “infection prevention and control program,” and a plan for monitoring the use of antibiotics.

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After nearly seven months of bickering and finger-pointing, Congress on Wednesday agreed to allocate $1.1 billion to help fight the spread and effects of the Zika virus.

The deal is part of a broader agreement to continue to fund the government after the fiscal year ends on Friday and the current budget expires.

It brings to an end a partisan fight that has had the unusual effect of delaying funding to deal with what all sides agree is a public health emergency. The delay came out because of disagreement over side issues like funding for Planned Parenthood and whether the money should be considered “emergency” spending.

Wednesday’s deal drops language barring the money from going to Planned Parenthood clinics. The Senate passed the measure Wednesday; it is pending in the House.

“Women’s health should never be treated like a political football,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, who is the ranking member of the Senate’s Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee. “I am glad that Republicans finally agreed to set aside the extreme provisions that would have specifically blocked Planned Parenthood health care providers from accessing critical funding.”

More than 23,000 people in the mainland U.S. and Puerto Rico have contracted the Zika virus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That includes more than 2,000 pregnant women, which is especially troubling because the virus can cause birth defects.

The CDC estimates that 20 babies in the mainland U.S. and 1 baby in Puerto Rica have been born with birth defects related to Zika.

The Zika virus can cause microcephaly — a condition where a baby’s head and brain are undersized and underdeveloped — in as many as 13 percent of babies born to women who get infected while pregnant. It is also linked to several other types of birth defects, and to Guillain-Barre syndrome in adults.

The deal reached in Congress includes $394 million to help control Zika-carrying mosquitoes and another $397 million to help develop a vaccine against the virus and better tests to help diagnose cases of Zika.

There is also $66 million allocated to health care for people affected by Zika in Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories.

President Obama asked for $1.9 billion in emergency federal funding back in February to fight Zika. The administration has been using money shifted from other accounts, including money that had been specified for studying and fighting Ebola, and for state-level emergency preparedness, to address the Zika threat.

Earlier this month Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned that his agency would run out of funds to fight Zika by Friday. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell issued a similar warning in August.

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Eating well has many known benefits. But a good diet may not be able to counteract all the ill effects of stress on our bodies.

A new study, published in Molecular Psychiatry, suggests stress can override the benefits of making better food choices.

To evaluate the interactions between diet and stress, researchers recruited 58 women who completed surveys to assess the kinds of stress they were experiencing. The women also participated in what researchers call a “meal challenge,” where they were each given two different types of meals to eat, on different days.

One meal was high in saturated fat, the type of fat linked to cardiovascular disease. The other meal was high in a plant-based oil, which is considered more healthful.

“When women were not stressed and they got the healthier meal, their inflammatory responses were lower than when they had the high saturated fat meal,” explains study author Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, director of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research at the Ohio State University. She says this was not a big surprise.

But here’s the part that may seem counterintuitive: “If a woman was stressed on a day when she got the healthy meal, she looked like she was eating the saturated fat meal in terms of her [inflammation] responses,” Kiecolt-Glaser explained.

In other words, the more healthful meal was no better in terms of its impact on inflammation. “The stress seemed to boost inflammation,” Kiecolt-Glaser explained.

The kinds of stressful events the women experienced weren’t life-threatening. Rather, they’re the sorts of events that make us feel overwhelmed or out of control, such as a child care scramble or caring for an elderly, sick parent.

The researchers measured several markers of inflammation in the body, including C-reactive protein, or CRP.

Over a lifetime, higher inflammation levels are linked to an increased risk of a range of diseases, including “cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, arthritis, some cancers,” Kiecolt-Glaser explains. “It’s an ugly list of possibilities.”

The findings add to the evidence that stress is a powerful player when it comes to influencing our health. Kiecolt-Glaser’s prior research has shown that people who are stressed heal wounds more slowly. She has also demonstrated that stress can promote weight gain by altering metabolism and slowing down calorie-burning.

Kiecolt-Glaser says there’s still a lot that’s unknown. For instance, in this new study, she’s not sure how the inflammation levels of stressed-out women would have been influenced by an ultra-healthful meal — say, an avocado with greens on a piece of whole-grain toast. She points out that both of the meals the women ate for this study were very high in calories and had about 60 grams of fat.

Now, if you’re looking for the upside in this line of research, rest assured: There are a whole range of strategies that have been shown to help manage stress.

“Close, personal relationships are perhaps the world’s greatest stress reducer,” Kiecolt-Glaser says. Studies of mindfulness meditation and yoga have also been shown to be effective.

And as we’ve reported, even doing nice things for others can help keep stress in check.

When I was reporting this story, I asked stressed-out Georgetown University law students what they do to manage stress. They pointed to a range of activities — from salsa dancing to listening to hip-hop to going to the gym. “I really enjoy exercising when I’m stressed. It gives you an outlet to distract you,” Marina Smith told me.

And it seems these students are on to some good strategies, says Aric Prather, an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, who studies how lifestyle choices influence health. “Exercise and social connectedness,” he says, “are effective in improving people’s well-being and their ability to cope with stress.”

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