Kickstart: Ransomware and prescription bottles

Bring your own bottle is taking on a new meaning for some patients, physicians and pharmacists caught up in a ransomware attack on the Ascension health care system.

The attack was noticed on May 8 when Ascension "detected unusual activity in our network systems." The St. Louis-based system is the sixth-largest in the U.S. Its electronic medical records [EMR] system remains offline, which means that while doctors and nurses can meet with patients, they must rely on paper notes and records.

With the EMR down, Ascension's pharmacies also cannot access digital prescriptions. As a result, some locations have shut down pharmacies completely while others are advising patients they can fill prescriptions but have to bring an existing prescription bottle to a physical location for refill.

Access to pharmacies, though, depends on Ascension networks within states. In an FAQ for patients, the company said no prescriptions are available in Wisconsin, while other locations note they "may be able to give you a short-term supply using your current prescription bottle."

Ascension advises all patients to try to get their medication from another location, if possible.

Hospital systems have become easy targets for cyberattacks because they tend to pay out quickly because their records are a matter of life and death, our sister paper Crain's Detroit Business notes.

Here's an update on the big investments by automaker Honda and its suppliers to create an electric vehicle infrastructure in Ontario: Asahi Kasei Corp. has named the location of its $1.1 billion plant to make battery separators.

Port Colborne is in southern Ontario, near Niagara Falls. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Koshiro Kudo, Asahi Kasei president, joined local leaders at a May 14 press conference to announce the project.

Asahi Kasei said in late April it would build a plant but didn't say where. Its customer, Honda, announced the same day that it was investing $11 billion for EV development in Alliston, Ontario — about 125 miles from Port Colborne — noting Asahi Kasei's involvement in the project.

Asahi Kasei's Hipore separators are a microporous polyolefin sheet at the center of lithium-ion battery cells.

A Canadian environmental group says it had a surprise finding when it tracked the types of trash collected during beach cleanups in 2023. For the first time in a decade, plastic straws were not among the most littered items.

While officials with Vancouver-based Ocean Wise were careful not to draw a direct correlation between a drop in straws found in 35,000 beach cleanup efforts and recent bans on the foodservice items for now, they did call it a "really positive surprise."

"I like to believe this is more than coincidence," Ocean Wise CEO Lasse Gustavsson said in a news release.

Cigarette butts, which have plastic filters, topped the group's "Dirty Dozen" list of most littered items with nearly 175,000 of them found in 2023. They were followed by "plastic pieces" with 97,898 items and paper at 41,907.