Table of Contents
Get your daily dose of health and medicine every weekday with STAT’s free Morning Rounds newsletter. Sign up here.
Do you need distraction from your election anxiety? May I suggest the new album from Québécois fiddle whooshes Alexis Chartrand and Nicolas Babineau, who fell on Friday and makes our heads buzz?
What would women’s health look like under RFK, Jr.?
In these final, anxious days of the presidential campaign, politicians have identified women’s health as one of the biggest issues in this election — and last Thursday, former President Donald Trump promised that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. work on the subject as part of his next government.
Kennedy’s history of vaccine skepticism has many in the science, public health and biopharmaceutical industries — and even some Republicans — concerned about what he would do if he were to hand over the keys to, say, a regulatory agency. As former Trump White House official Joe Grogan told STAT, “the RFK announcement has shaken up some of the traditional thinking.” RFK Jr.’s cousin, prominent health care attorney Ted Kennedy Jr., just endorsed Kamala Harris and told my colleague Sarah Owermohle that “anti-vaccine rhetoric … is dangerous to the public health and safety of Americans.”
When it comes to women’s health specifically, Kennedy is difficult to pin down. At one point he expressed support for federal abortion restrictions, but has since reversed that. Meanwhile, Kennedy also said this weekend that Trump would try to do that remove fluoride from drinking water if chosen.
What really happens to drug prices when patents expire?
In theory, the price of a drug should drop once it is no longer protected by a patent. So what happened in that case with the blockbuster Humira? The patent expired in 2016, but the average list price increased from $752.41 in 2003 to $2,984.09 in 2021.
As Anna Yeo explains in this video, the answer lies in a tricky legal maneuver by Abbvie, the manufacturer of Humira. By expanding the patent to include new data on the drug, the company was able to create more obstacles for competitors hoping to grab a share of the market by selling biosimilars. Not sure how that works, or what the difference is between a generic and a biosimilar? Anna’s video makes it all crystal clear.
The case against eponyms
In the 1960s, researchers discovered that what was once considered a single rare disease known as Niemann-Pick was in fact two different diseases, each with its own biology and prognosis. It wasn’t until 2017 that scientists, patients and health care providers recommended a new name for one of them — acid sphingomyelinase deficiency, or ASMD — to emphasize how much more was now understood and to avoid confusion.
But as Kara Ayik writes in a First Opinion, doctors and researchers are slow to make the switch. This carries the risk of confusion, but also erodes patients’ trust in their care team. Read more.
The watchdogs that search scientific articles for problems
We would like to think that the findings in peer-reviewed journals are reliable – good-faith contributions to the ever-evolving scientific literature.
Unfortunately no such luck. Where there is pressure to publish splashy results, there is an incentive to falsify them, whether that is by pushing data in the desired direction or by manipulating images. A loose group of sleuths has dedicated themselves to tracking down these cases of misconduct.
Their discoveries have already led to the departure of a Stanford president, led to Justice Department indictments, exposed paper mills that sell author credits to professors who pad their resumes, and led to a striking number of retractions. You can read more about these DIY data detectives from STAT’s Jonathan Wosen.
How adults with cerebral palsy are overlooked
Cerebral palsy is often called “the most common motor disability in childhood.” But as Mark Peterson, professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Michigan, notes in a new perspective for the New England Journal of MedicineThere are more adults than children in the United States living with this group of diseases. They often face serious problems when they graduate from pediatrics to adult medical practice.
“My doctor told me I couldn’t have cerebral palsy because I’m not a child anymore,” one patient reported. “A medical support structure carefully built over decades and gone in a minute,” said another. There are also gaps in the data used to assess outcomes later in life, Peterson writes. He suggests reframing CP as “the most common lifelong physical disability” to increase understanding and ultimately help people receive better care.
What you need to know about new Marburg cases in Rwanda
The Marburg outbreak in Rwanda has reached a critical stage. The country, which is aggressively battling its first outbreak of viral hemorrhagic fever, appears to have gained the upper hand against the virus, which causes diseases similar to Ebola. But these types of outbreaks are often difficult to extinguish; Late setbacks are all too common. After nine days with no new cases, there have been four new infections in the past two weeks, at least one of which was a person living near one of the earliest known cases.
At a press conference on Friday, Rob Holden, the WHO’s incident manager for the outbreak, described the new cases as “quite complex”, adding that it was a challenge to monitor them to determine how they fit into the picture of the breakout fit. Holden said increased surveillance at this stage is crucial, a message the country appears to have adopted. Health workers are going door to door in the area where the outbreak is believed to have started, Foreign Minister Yvan Butera said late last week. So far there have been 66 confirmed cases and 15 deaths. –Helen Branswell
What we read
-
Dentists are pulling ‘healthy’ and treatable teeth to benefit from implants, experts warn: KFF Health News
-
New research into migraines offers the prospect of better therapies WashingtonPost
- Lawsuit to Resolve Pulse Oximeter Bias Makes Progress at Device Manufacturers, STAT
- ‘Some weren’t happy’: Dispute erupted at Boston Children’s Hospital over how to screen children for gender transition, Boston sphere
- Healthcare executives usually donate to Democrats, but avoid Trump and Harris, STAT