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Today’s first opinion on poop transplants taught me a new word: fulminant. According to Merriam-Webster, the adjective describes something that comes on “suddenly and with great severity.” Scroll all the way down for context.
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One death from Lassa fever reported in Iowa
Here’s a virus you may not have heard of: Lassa fever is most commonly transmitted to humans through a rodent called the many-nipped rat, and can cause an Ebola-like illness in some patients. The disease is endemic in a number of countries in West Africa, where it causes hundreds of thousands of infections – and around 5,000 deaths – every year. On Monday, health officials in Iowa announced that someone in the state who recently traveled to West Africa died after contracting the disease.
The virus is rare in the US, with only eight known imported cases in the past 55 years, including this latest one. An important note: Although symptoms are similar to those of an Ebola infection, Lassa fever does not cause a large chain of human cases. STAT’s Helen Branswell has everything you need to know about the virus and the case in Iowa.
How deportation attorneys can help combat premature births
In 2017, New York City began rolling out a program that guaranteed lawyers for low-income tenants in certain zip codes. The number of evictions was reduced by half, according to a study published yesterday JAMA Pediatrics found that the program was also associated with a 0.96% reduction in premature births and babies born at low weight. That may sound small, but it is statistically significant and translates into 600 fewer adverse birth outcomes per year.
Researchers used city vital records to analyze more than 260,000 Medicaid-insured births in the city between 2016 and 2020. More than 43,000 of those occurred in zip codes where eviction attorneys were available during the program’s staggered implementation. Over four years, adverse birth outcomes continued to increase in neighborhoods where renters were not offered attorneys, while rates stabilized in areas where they were.
“It’s the same populations being evicted that are most at risk for poor birth outcomes to begin with,” researcher Gracie Himmelstein told me in 2021 after writing a study on the link between eviction and poor birth outcomes. Neither study proves a causal relationship, but the evidence suggests that a right-to-counsel program could have real public health benefits, the recent study authors write. Some form of tenant’s right to advice now exists in 17 cities, two counties and five states.
“People had polio,” Trump tells Joe Rogan. ‘It felt like a disaster.’
On Friday, former President Trump sat down for a nearly three-hour interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, during which he spoke carefully about vaccine safety. “They’ve come up with some amazing things,” he said when Rogan asked about the pharmaceutical industry. “I know you’re against certain vaccines, but just like the polio vaccine, people had polio. It felt like a disaster.”
Later in the weekend, Trump told New York rallygoers at Madison Square Garden that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (who has a history of vaccine skepticism) would indeed play a role in a second administration. GOP officials and industry executives have expressed fear about what RFK Jr. could do in an official role. But Trump’s comments on vaccines also indicate that he is echoing RFK Jr.’s rhetoric. has not fully adopted.
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Could Some Ultra-Processed Foods Be Good for You?
Not all ultra-processed foods are created equal. You have your chicken nuggets, but you also have whole grain cereals and breads. The wide variety among such foods makes it difficult to determine the link between ultra-processed foods and a particular health outcome. Last month, physician and researcher JoAnn Manson analyzed three large, long-term studies on ultra-processed foods and cardiovascular disease.
STAT’s Liz Cooney spoke with Manson about what she and her colleagues had found. “We were actually surprised that there were several types of ultra-processed foods that were associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease,” Manson told Liz. “We didn’t expect so much diversity between types of ultra-processed foods.” Read more from Liz.
Quick stats: Alzheimer’s in the emergency room
In 2022, Alzheimer’s disease was the seventh leading cause of death in the US. Yesterday, the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics released a report report about how people aged 65 and older with Alzheimer’s disease interacted with emergency departments across the country from 2020 to 2022. Here’s what the data shows:
- About 36 out of 1,000 people in this age group with Alzheimer’s disease visited hospital emergency rooms during that period, and that percentage increased with age.
- Arriving by ambulance at the emergency room was almost twice as common among older adults with Alzheimer’s disease than among older adults without the disease.
- More than a third (37%) of emergency room visits by people with Alzheimer’s disease ended with the patient being admitted to the hospital, compared to about 28% of visits by people without the disease.
Stay up to date on the latest news about Alzheimer’s disease with STAT’s great reporting.
Is ‘poo as medicine’ in danger? (Yes, you read that right.)
Doctor Neil Stollman started performing “poo transplants” twenty years ago. He’s kept doing it all this time because, as gross as it sounds, it really works. For patients with a specific, devastating bacterial infection in their colon called C. diff, a fecal transplant can repair damage to the organ’s microbiome, weakening the bacteria.
But a looming FDA deadline has called into question the future of this care for the most vulnerable populations. The agency has approved two biotherapeutic fecal transplant products for C. diff patients, but neither is indicated for severe, fulminant or pediatric patients. In a First Opinion essay, he argues that the FDA should ensure continued access to experimental fecal microbiota transplants for those who need them. Read more.
What we read
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How a proposed federal heat rule could have saved the lives of these workers KFF Health News
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Preparing for a new reality: hurricanes threaten health Boston sphere
- Dreams about cancer vaccines are becoming more and more real. Here are 9 scientists who are making it possible, STAT
- Pakistan begins a new vaccination campaign after a worrying rise in polio cases. AP
- I’m the director of the Center for Medicare. Here’s how we conducted the first round of drug price negotiations, STAT