Childhood obesity, bird flu, Covid vaccines

GGood morning! For a limited time you can get your first three months of a STAT+ subscription for just $5. It’s been about a decade since you could get a foot length from Subway for that price. So it’s a pretty good deal for all the latest in health and life sciences, if you ask me.

AAP has misinterpreted research on childhood obesity and eating disorders

For the first time in fifteen years, the American Academy of Pediatrics last year presented new clinical guidelines for tackling childhood obesity. The guidelines shifted the previous standard of “watchful waiting” by youth to consider interventions such as bariatric surgery, GLP-1 medications, and intensive behavioral treatment. The group recommended that pediatricians continue treatment “at the highest level of intensity appropriate and available to the child.”

The new guidelines concerned some experts, especially those who focused on the risk of eating disorders. The AAP cited three scientific articles to support its conclusion that these aggressive treatments would not fuel disordered eating behavior. But in interviews with STAT staffer Kate Raphael, the authors of each article said the AAP misinterpreted or misused their work.

“I’m not sure I know why we were quoted,” said one author. Read more in an exclusive story from Raphael about the AAP’s questionable use of evidence to support some of its recommendations.

37%

That’s the percentage of respondents in a poll of about 1,000 people who said they have been vaccinated in the past but feel they don’t need flu and Covid vaccines this year. The pollconducted by The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, found that just over half (56%) have received or plan to get the flu shot this season, while less than half (43%) have the Covid vaccine received or will receive.

(Why might more people get a flu shot than a Covid shot? STAT’s Helen Branswell answered this question earlier this year.)

New information on Missouri’s bird flu case

Last week we heard about a person in Missouri who contracted bird flu in what STAT’s Lev Facher brilliantly called a “blameless infection” — meaning the person somehow got sick without any exposure to sick animals or poultry . But the plot thickened on Friday when CDC revealed that a close contact of that person was also sick around the same time. But the second person was not tested for flu.

The information about this second person — a possible second case of human bird flu — was not mentioned once during an hour-long press conference involving CDC officials on Thursday, STAT’s Helen Branswell reported. Instead, the information was released Friday in the weekly flu activity report. Read more from Helen about what we know.

Are the doctors’ protests in India missing their target?

Doctors across India have been protesting for weeks after one of their own was raped and murdered in a public hospital by someone who was neither a patient nor a staff member. Protesters demand ‘justice for the victim’ and a safer working environment. In West Bengal, where the killing took place, doctors in public hospitals have been on strike for a month.

But in a First Opinion essay, historian Kiran Kumbhar – who previously practiced medicine in India – argues that the protests are overlooking an important aspect of the terrible crime. It was less about medicine and more about an ongoing epidemic of violence against women, he writes. Read more.

Half a million children in Gaza vaccinated against polio

About 560,000 children under the age of 10 have received the first dose of an oral vaccine against polio during the WHO’s first emergency vaccination campaign in Gaza, the organization said. announced Friday. “The progress made in this first round is encouraging, but the job is far from done,” Jean Gough, UNICEF Special Representative to the State of Palestine, said in a press release. Experts began to fear that polio was spreading in the region in July after the virus spread detected in wastewater samples.

The organization originally planned to vaccinate 640,000 children in the first two weeks of September – but it is difficult to keep track of how many children remain in Gaza as the population continues to flee violence and countless lives are lost in attacks, the organization said. WHO. The organization hopes to launch a campaign to give children a second dose of the vaccine within a month, and called for a new humanitarian pause and “a long-term ceasefire.”

Is it possible to humanely make a mouse depressed?

There is an urgent need for new, more effective antidepressants. Before these drugs are tested on humans, they are often tested on mice – but how do scientists know which mice are depressed? The ‘forced swim test’, developed in 1977, involves placing a mouse in a small tank filled with water. When the mouse stops fighting to escape and simply floats motionless, researchers label that as a depressive state. The ‘tail suspension test’ involves a mouse dangling by its tail in a small room. Again, once it stops trying to escape, it’s officially depressed.

These so-called depressed mice have been used to advance human medicine, but psychiatrist Karen S. Greenberg writes that these methods have had mixed results at best. In a First Opinion essay, Greenberg argues that such testing should be halted in favor of more modern, non-animal-based approaches to testing. Read more.

What we read

• Gloves on! London review of books

• AstraZeneca’s Imfinzi increases survival rates for bladder cancer in the pivotal STAT study

• “What will happen in three months?” Mental health after Georgia high school shooting KFF Health News

• FDA Approves Roche’s Injectable Version of Successful Multiple Sclerosis Drug, STAT
• Gas stoves could soon come with a tobacco-style health warning label in California, NPR
• The Pfizer drug shows promise in cancer-related conditions that cause weight loss and weakness, STAT