Table of Contents
It’s my last week here at Morning Rounds, but I have exciting news just for you: starting in February you can meet me at AI Prognosis, a new STAT+ newsletter about AI.
The newsletter’s tagline is: “A hitchhiker’s guide to the healthcare AI system.” You can consider me as yours Mrs. Frizzle (Dr. Frizzle?), in which he explains what the various developments in AI in patient care, biotechnology and health technology mean for you (and drops some fire music recommendations every week).
You can both sign up for the newsletter and ask me your most embarrassing questions about AI in health and medicine here. And if you sign up before the newsletter comes out, you’ll get the first four issues for free, even if you’re not a STAT+ subscriber.
Bad day to be a salmon
Yesterday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration updated its definition of “healthy” food for the first time in three decades.
Under the new definition, more foods qualify as healthy, including fish with higher fat content, such as salmon; as well as nuts, seeds and certain oils. Although there was insufficient evidence for a Dietary Guidelines Advisory Panel to take a position on ultra-processed foods, the new definition disqualifies many ultra-processed foods, such as cereals that do not contain enough whole grains or contain too much sugar.
While experts like Eva Greenthal, a senior policy scientist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said the new rule is an improvement, she also noted that “the most important step the Biden administration can take to leverage food labels for public health is to publish the FDA’s proposed rule on mandatory front-of-pack nutrition labeling, allowing consumers to quickly compare the basic nutritional information of foods.
Read more about the new definition and whether it will really impact the health of Americans from STAT’s Liz duo, Lizzy Lawrence and Liz Cooney.
This cannot be prevented, says only a prosperous country where high maternal mortality regularly occurs
The statistics on maternal mortality in the US are frightening. But is it 23.8 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2020, or 24.9 or 18.4 – all official statistics from various CDC sources?
Experts studying the issue say quibbles about counting maternal deaths — or minimize the urgency of the problem – should not overshadow the fundamental work of asking how and why such deaths occurred, and how to prevent them.
Looking at other developed countries with much lower maternal mortality rates, there are clear patterns: “They have universal health insurance, they have paid leave, they have all these other things that make life more livable for a pregnant woman and her family,” says Eugene Declerq , professor of community health sciences at Boston University School of Public Health and a leading expert on maternal mortality data. “That is right in the wheelhouse of policymakers, and then that is uncomfortable, because that is real expenditure.”
Read more about how we count maternal deaths and why the mortality crisis is so dire from former STAT reporter Annalisa Merelli.
House Republicans are dropping PPE reform to fund the government
Everyone from Lina Khan’s Federal Trade Commission to President-elect Donald Trump has spoken out against pharmacy benefit managers, the middlemen between insurers (who often own PBMs), and the pharmaceutical industry. (For a refresher on what PBMs are and how they affect drug pricing, see here this STAT explainer.)
Earlier this week, STAT reported that lawmakers reached a deal to rein in these middlemen. But that health care deal has fallen apart because it was attached to a larger package that has since crumbled amid opposition from conservatives and top Trump advisers. To learn more about what other health care funding measures have been cut and the future of PBM reform, read Rachel Cohrs Zhang’s story in STAT+.
STAT’s year in photos
Every time people are kind enough to let STAT reporters into their lives and trust us with their stories, it is a gift. We spend hours with them, sometimes spanning months or years, and get a sense of who they are, what motivates them.
But how do we convey that to you, the reader? We try to do it with our words, and our talented photographers find ways to tell stories with single images.
Our multimedia editor Alissa Ambrose and photo editor Crystal Milner have a visual feast for you from the past year: STAT’s most memorable photos of 2024.
Take time to look back today, whether it’s staring into the eyes of women with sickle cell disease who bravely tell the stories of how they were forced into sterilizations, to a widow who has experienced the human toll of the pursuit of profit of UnitedHealth Group, or the unspoken but visibly clear bond between a husband and wife team who together have achieved more for science than they could have achieved individually.
California is on fire due to a virus
For months, federal officials have expressed confidence that they know how H5N1 bird flu spreads among dairy cows: movement of animals between farms, on workers’ boots or clothing, and through communal, shared equipment.
But to other epidemiologists and infectious disease experts, this doesn’t explain why California has exploded with H5N1, even on farms that adhere to strict sanitary protocols. The nation’s largest dairy-producing state has now detected the virus on more than 650 dairy farms — about half of them in the past month alone.
Seema Lakdawala, an associate professor in the department of microbiology and immunology at Emory University School of Medicine, is baffled by some of the USDA’s theories. It is more likely that workers will contract the virus themselves and spread it to other animals. She has seen farm workers “use the same rags to dry the cows and wipe their own faces, so there are a lot of potential contaminants there,” she said.
Read more from STAT’s Megan Molteni for more possible reasons behind the spread, and why current protocols can’t detect and stop the virus.
1 in 127
That’s the number of people in the world estimated to be on the autism spectrum in 2021, according to the latest estimates from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors and published yesterday in Lancet Psychiatry. This is much higher than the estimate of 1 in 271 people in 2019. The number changed largely due to a change in methodology: the report now excludes studies that base their estimates solely on medical records, which do not take into account every case .
What we read
-
Pregnant Kentucky woman caught camping on the street while giving birth Kentucky Public Radio
-
Humans evolved for distance running – but ancestor ‘Lucy’ didn’t go far or fast, Nature
-
Gene therapy trials should emphasize transparency, not secrecy, STAT
-
The Egg: a story of extraction, exploitation and opportunity, Business week
-
Journal that published erroneous study on black plastic removed from scientific index, Ars Technica
-
FDA Approves New Device for Non-Invasive Treatment of Spinal Cord Injuries, STAT