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Ggood morning. What a news week. I’m Isabella Cueto, chronic disease reporter at STAT, and so it’s my duty to say: pause. Take a deep breath. A sip of water would be nice. Maybe a piece of fruit? A short walk around lunchtime? Cool. To the news:
Trump chooses Dr. Oz to lead CMS
President-elect Trump has selected TV personality Mehmet Oz as administrator of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Oz, a heart surgeon, would influence the policies that decide payments to hospitals, health care providers and insurers. He would also oversee Medicare and Medicaid health plans, as well as the Affordable Care Act.
Oz previously ran for the US Senate as a Republican with Trump’s support, but lost to Democrat John Fetterman. While health secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has rejected the influence of pharmaceutical manufacturers, Oz’s bid was supported in the Senate by Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer. Oz too attended Kennedy’s election party in Palm Beach, Florida. (The two go way back.)
Although Oz has touted astrology as a medical tool and promoted a variety of nutritional supplements, he also endorsed vaccines and masks. Read more from Rachel Cohrs Zhang and Sarah Owermohle on the News, and don’t miss this 2023 story from our archives about understanding Oz as both a source of medical misinformation and as a figure who has “influenced people toward scientific consistency .”
Pharmaceutical executives are keeping their cool on RFK Jr. as his legal battle against vaccines continues
Meanwhile, pharmaceutical industry executives appear to be channeling the news “This is fine” dog while RFK Jr.’s nomination looms for the Department of Health and Human Services, despite the politician’s outspoken criticism of the industry. STAT’s Andrew Joseph reports at an investor conference in London this week that executives projected nonchalance. Even vaccine makers, who are likely to face the worst of Kennedy’s wrath, have shrugged off the potential fallout. “We think the Covid business is here to stay,” said Ryan Richardson, BioNTech’s chief strategy officer.
And while Kennedy has said he won’t take away the vaccines. He and his nonprofit are involved in many legal battles over Covid shots, vaccine mandates and online censorship of misinformation. Several pending cases target the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — agencies Kennedy would oversee as HHS secretary. Read more from Sarah Owermohle and me.
California reports case of bird flu in a child
California reported on Tuesday a possible case of H5 bird flu in a child who had no known contact with infected animals. The child, who lives in Alameda County, southeast of Oakland, was treated for mild upper respiratory symptoms and is recovering at home, according to a news release from the state’s public health department. The child tested positive for other viruses that may be the true cause of the symptoms, the statement said. Other family members also had symptoms, but all tested negative for bird flu.
State health officials, investigating the possibility that the child was exposed to wild birds, send the child’s specimen to the CDC for confirmatory testing. The statement said the virus levels in the test were low, which could make it difficult for the CDC to confirm the infection. So far this year, the CDC has confirmed 53 H5 cases in seven states, almost all of them involving people who worked with infected dairy cows or were involved in culling infected poultry. Stay up to date with STAT’s coverage of the latest bird flu news here. — Helen Branswell
Where are all the Asian American doctors?
Trick question. A new one study in JAMA Network Open finds that while Asian Americans are well represented in medicine, members of some Asian subgroups—Laotian Americans, Cambodian Americans, and Filipino Americans—are vastly underrepresented. Such underrepresentation has gone unnoticed due to the common practice of treating Asian Americans as a monolith and lumping them all together, despite the wide disparities that exist in educational attainment, income, health outcomes, and food security.
The study also found that Asian Americans from almost every subgroup were less represented at higher career levels and among academic medical schools. Laotian American, Cambodian American, and Filipino American medical students were also less represented in the most selective medical specialties that require the longest training. In contrast, those who were Taiwanese American, Pakistani American, Korean American, and Chinese American were represented at higher levels.
Disaggregating data to better understand the Asian American population is critical, the authors write, and could help prevent underinvestment in this group, noting that over the past 25 years, only 0.17% of NIH funding has gone to research on Asian Americans. — Usha Lee McFarling
48,870
That’s the number of people who died from alcohol-related causes in 2020. Put another way, that’s a death rate of 21.6 per 100,000 people — more than double what it was in 1999, researchers report in a new study. in the American Journal of Medicine. CDC data suggests that alcohol-related deaths have increased across all age groups, but the largest increases occurred among those aged 25 to 34 (a 3.8-fold increase). Women, Asians and Pacific Islanders saw more than a twofold increase.
Alcohol-related harm and deaths have been rising for years, but the pandemic has accelerated the problem. A separate study in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that the prevalence of alcohol use and heavy alcohol use increased between 2018 and 2020, and that the increase continued into 2022, although recent polls indicate that public attitudes towards alcohol are shifting.
(The CDC offers a free tool for adults to monitor their drinking levels and make a plan to cut back.)
If you or someone you know is concerned about substance use, call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357) or visit findtreatment.gov.
A cautionary tale about medical device safety, finally told
One day in 2011, a woman in Georgia discovered a piece of metal protruding from her thigh. She later finds out that this was from an implanted medical device that had become dislodged in her body. She is suing the device manufacturer, Cook Medical, citing evidence that critical safety issues were overlooked in clinical trials. That information has been shielded from the public for years.
This is a case that researchers say illustrates how medical device regulation can leave patients in the dark — “a tangible example of where that lack of transparency really does harm,” device safety expert Kushal Kadakia told Liz Lawrence from STAT. Kadakia is co-author of a new article in the Annals of Internal Medicine that shares for the first time the confidential details of the Cook Medical case – including alleged flaws in the clinical trial, and how expert witnesses were banned from speaking about it for a while . decade. Read more.