Measles in Texas, CDCs Sti Lab, Migration

Buy your daily dose of health and medicines every weekday with the free newsletter morning rounds from Stat. Register here.

Good morning. I was really interested in the variety of reactions that came in with regard to last week’s first opinion about the use of cadavers in the medical school. I once searched for a cada leaf Laboratory, and it was a creepy but in -depth experience. I don’t know the best way ahead for medical training, but I hope that respect for patients – people – and their bodies are central to the aim.

Where the US goes after a second child died of measles

A second non -vaccinated child died of measles in West -Texas. She was 8 years old and previously healthy. On Sunday, after news about her death, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In a post on X that “is the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles, the MMR vaccine.” It is his most direct explanation so far, after saying less than a month ago – to current evidence – that the shot of measles caused killing every year.

The death of the child represents a tragedy that makes experts about to become a lot less rare, reports Stat’s Helen Branswell. “With two, perhaps three people, I don’t think it’s unbelievable that we will see more,” said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist of infectious diseases. Peter Marks, the recently expelled Top vaccines Regulator at the FDA, said it a little differently.

“Unless we change course dramatically, change the course drastically, it becomes a problem,” he said Helen. “This is what Mazles does.” Read more Van Helen about the challenges that are for us.

Gonorrhea, HIV, asthma and lead poisoning

In the past week, Stat reporters have been deeply affected by the enormous cuts on staff and the financing of President Trump. Here is the latter:

All 28 full-time employees were fired on the STD lab of CDC last week, Helen reports. Closing the premiere facility comes at a time when the whole world is due to a single medicine that can heal gonorrhea in a reliable way, so that experts get afraid of what awaits us. (The disease has developed resistance to almost all antibiotics that are used against it, and it seems possible that even the last one that could soon be conquered). Read more Van Helen about the consequences and what explanation HHS gave for the decision.

There are also countless HIV -prevention -efforts also HamStung, reports Stat’s Jason Mast. Last week’s cuts, CDC branches are responsible for a national test at home, long-term surveys, statistical analysis and guidance. Funds have been suspended for the two most prominent networks for testing prevention medicines and vaccines, Jason also learned. The exact toll so far is difficult to quantify. Yet, “what we see can only be summarized by the words chaos and terror,” said Colleen Kelley, chairman of the HIV Medicine Association. Read more.

But it is not only contagious disease that is the target. According to an internal CDC document that is shared with Stat’s Eric Boodman, the division of the Environmental Health Science and Practice agency “was eliminated in its entirety.” With the possible exception of assignment for public health officials, every employee, including the director, was placed on leave last week. These are the people who answer questions about asthma after hurricanes have led through communities, leaving the soaked furniture and moldy debris. It is also the people who would respond in the case of a radiation case. They are the ones in the middle of dealing with a continuous lead-exposure crisis at Milwaukee schools. Read more from Eric about what happens without the division.

A therapeutic safety net for federal employees

If you have ever experienced fired at work, you know how stressful they can be, even under normal circumstances. But since Trump’s inauguration, federal employees have experienced ‘one fire after the other’, as one employee brought it to Stat’s Liz Cooney. “There has really been no delay since January 20,” they added.

A framework of psychologists from outside the government saw what happened and has registered to provide federal employees for low or no reimbursements – a kind of therapeutic safety net. A list of therapists is available about what his maker calls an underground network, with which federal employees can contact us through employee utensils or other internal sources.

“I just want to show the world, and people who are in this vulnerable time, that there is still compassion, despite the rhetoric, despite the suffering,” said Gerald Joseph, a doctor who has offered to help people deal with the cuts. Read more.

A new device facilitates ‘natural conversation’ for people with paralysis

Neuroscientists got closer last week when developing a commercial device that can immediately translate brain activity into speech for people with serious paralysis, reports Stat’s O. Rose Broderick.

An important problem for existing interfaces of the brain computer is the delay between the thought of a person and the speech of the machine, which is usually a few seconds, Rose explains. That makes it difficult for someone with an implant to have a normal conversation or to feel embodied. But a new proof-of-concept study shows how one device has shortened the time that is needed to broadcast the words of a person as they wish.

Read more from Rose about the study, in which a gap was born in the participant’s skull and measuring her brain activity with a series of electrodes that lay over her motor cortex.

The dangers of migration

When President Trump and other national leaders talk about migration on the southern American border, they talk about safety in the sense of building an impenetrable border. Less a concern seems to be the health and safety of the people who make the journey. But interviews with 67 clinicians for medical emergency services who work along the border between Mexico and Arizona, published on Friday in Jama Network OpenPain a picture of “numerous, continuous, massive victim-like events”, in which EMS employees are sometimes overwhelmed and poorly equipped to treat their patients.

‘I feel [like] We serve a federal problem at the municipal level and without support or without the finances or without the resources, “said a doctor. The EMS employees interviewed are employed by local fire brigades, and their work is not subsidized by federal resources.

At the actual border fence, traumatic injury is typical. ‘Usually it is [the] Lower half of the body, because that is sometimes what touches first, “said a doctor. A doctor reported that he had to use hand signals and Google Translate to communicate with a few migrants who have been shot. In the meantime, Borderpatrouille cannot transport people when they are patients – only EMS is certified to do that.

The authors of the study ask for more federal financing to support these employees and predict that any increased efforts to lock the limit will only increase the burden for EMS doctors who work there.

What we read

• While measles spread, some doctors see the virus for the first time, New York Times

• My snail mucin is trapped in a trade war, Atlantic

• Do not forget the continuous threat of cuts on the indirect research costs of universities, Stat
• Body modificators break linguistics, Sequencer
• Medicare gets a large (unofficial) surprise: an extension of 17 years if it will run dry, stat