Good 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 footlong from Subway at that price. So it’s a pretty good deal for all the latest news in health and the life sciences, if you ask me.
AAP misconstrued research on childhood obesity and eating disorders
For the first time in 15 years, the American Academy of Pediatrics last year put forward new clinical guidelines for addressing obesity in children. The guidelines shifted the former standard of “watchful waiting” through youth to considering interventions like bariatric surgery, GLP-1 medications, and intensive behavioral treatment. The group advised pediatricians to pursue treatment “at the highest level of intensity appropriate for and available to the child.”
The new guidelines concerned some experts, especially those focused on the risk of eating disorders. The AAP cited three academic papers to support the conclusion that these aggressive treatments would not fuel disordered eating behaviors. But in interviews with STAT contributor Kate Raphael, authors of each paper said that the AAP misconstrued or misused their work.
“I am not sure that I know why we were quoted,” one author said. 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 don’t feel they need flu and Covid vaccines this year. The poll, performed by the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, found that slightly over half (56%) have gotten or plan to get the flu shot this season, while less than half (43%) have gotten or will get the Covid vaccine.
(Why might more people get a flu shot than a Covid shot? STAT’s Helen Branswell answered this question earlier this year.)
New intel in Missouri bird flu case
Last week, we learned about a person in Missouri who contracted bird flu in what STAT’s Lev Facher brilliantly referred to as an “immaculate infection” — meaning the person somehow got sick without any exposure to any 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 influenza.
The information about this second person — a potential second human bird flu case — was not mentioned once in an hour-long press briefing involving CDC officials on Thursday, STAT’s Helen Branswell reported. Rather, the information was disclosed Friday in its weekly report on influenza activity. Read more from Helen on what we know.
Are doctors’ protests in India missing the point?
Doctors across India have been protesting for weeks after one of their own was raped and murdered at a public hospital by somebody who was neither a patient nor staff. Protestors are demanding “justice for the victim” and a safer work environment. In West Bengal, where the murder occurred, junior doctors in public hospitals have been on strike for a month.
But in a First Opinion essay, historian Kiran Kumbhar — who formerly practiced medicine in India himself — argues that the protests are overlooking a key aspect of the horrible 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
Around 560,000 children under the age of 10 have received the first dose of an oral vaccine against polio during WHO’s first emergency vaccination campaign in Gaza, the organization announced Friday. “The progress made in this first round is encouraging, but the job is far from done,” Jean Gough, UNICEF Special Representative in 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 was detected in wastewater samples.
The organization originally set out to vaccinate 640,000 children in the first two weeks of September — but it’s hard to keep track of how many children are left in Gaza as the population continues to flee violence and innumerable lives are lost in attacks, WHO said. The organization hopes to initiate a campaign within a month to give children a second dose of the vaccine, and called for another humanitarian pause and “a long-lasting ceasefire.”
Is it possible to humanely make a mouse depressed?
There’s an urgent need for new, more effective antidepressant medications. Before those drugs are tested in humans, they’re often tested in mice — but how do scientists know which mice are depressed? In the “forced swim test,” developed in 1977, a mouse is placed in a small tank filled with water. When the mouse stops fighting to escape and simply floats, unmoving, researchers label that as a depressive state. In the “tail suspension test,” a mouse is dangled by its tail in a small chamber. Again, once it stops trying to escape, it is 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 tests need to be retired in favor of more modern, non-animal-based approaches to testing. Read more.
What we’re reading
-
Gloves on! London Review of Books
- AstraZeneca’s Imfinzi increases survival rates in bladder cancer in pivotal study, STAT
-
‘What happens three months from now?’ Mental health after Georgia high school shooting, KFF Health News
- FDA approves Roche’s injectable version of blockbuster multiple sclerosis drug, STAT
- Gas stoves may soon come with a tobacco-style health warning label in California, NPR
- Pfizer drug shows promise in cancer-related condition that causes weight loss and weakness, STAT