Get your daily dose of health and medicine every weekday with STAT’s free newsletter Morning Rounds. Sign up here.
Hi there! I’m Sarah — former Morning Rounds editor, current STAT reporter, and your friendly sub today.
My new beat covering the commercial determinants of health has me paying a lot more attention to the nutrition labels on the foods I feed my one-year-old — and myself. What questions do you have about how the food, alcohol, and tobacco industries affect us? Email me at [email protected].
How RFK’s reversal of fortunes propelled him to HHS
-jpg.jpeg)
ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images
For a moment in late January, it looked like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine criticism might cost him the confirmation as head of the Department of Health and Human Services. But Republican senators Bill Cassidy (La.), Susan Collins (Maine), and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), all of whom voiced deep concerns over RFK Jr.’s misinformation campaigns and anti-scientific claims during his confirmation hearings, ultimately voted him into a role that gives him enormous power and influence over all Americans’ health.
If you’re still wrapping your mind around how this happened, don’t miss Lev Facher and Sarah Owermohle’s dive into Kennedy’s “unlikely path from fringe conspiracist to the nation’s top health official.” Of note: Not only did every Republican senator except Mitch McConnell vote yes on Kennedy, there’s been nary a peep of protest on his confirmation from many leading medical organizations. And be sure to read Isabella Cueto on the Make America Healthy Again commission established yesterday by President Trump, with Kennedy as chair, charged with combatting childhood chronic disease.
New evidence suggests bird flu in veterinarians went undetected
A study looking at whether veterinarians who work with cows have been unknowingly infected with H5N1 bird flu supports the idea that some human infections are being missed. The study, published Thursday in CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, found that of 150 large animal vets who were tested at a conference in September, three had antibodies to H5N1. None reported having had symptoms and two of the three had been unaware of being in contact with infected animals. One lived in a state — South Carolina — where no outbreaks in cows have been reported.
A previous study of dairy farmworkers in Michigan and Colorado found that 7% had antibodies to the virus. Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, said it’s been assumed that human cases and cow outbreaks have been underreported, which could explain the antibodies in the vet from South Carolina. Another possibility, he said, is that that the tests could have been false positives. Either way, more surveillance is needed, Poulsen said: “It suggests that this is an issue that is not going away and we can’t ignore it.” The study was scheduled to be published several weeks ago, but was held back as part of the Trump administration’s enforced communications pause. — Helen Branswell
A new approach to curing Huntington’s disease
In the decades-long quest to find a cure for Huntington’s disease, researchers are making promising headway on a new approach — one which slows down the process of gene expansion. In a study published earlier this week in Science Translational Medicine, researchers in the UK developed an antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) that targets a DNA repair protein involved in a process that causes a stutter of three letters found in the Huntington’s gene to expand, growing more unstable, and leading to the progression of the disease.
Treatment with the ASO stopped the gene from further expanding in both mice and in human neurons grown in the lab. “These data set the path towards future clinical development” of the approach, the study’s lead author, Sarah Tabrizi of the University College London told STAT.
Drugmaker interest in strategies for stabilizing the Huntington’s gene has been growing, in response to a radical shift in how researchers understand the biology of the disease over the last few years. — Megan Molteni
Scientists self-censor over trigger words like “women” and “bias”
Photo illustration: STAT; Photograph: Getty Images
A grant that uses words like “diversity,” “trans,” “women,” and “Covid” is at risk of getting flagged by reviews underway at the National Institutes of Health and some Veteran Affairs sites at the behest of the Trump administration — and that means some scientists are trying to find ways to work around those keywords when possible, or considering leaving academia altogether.
The reviews seem to be the result of Trump’s executive order that federal agencies stop funding grants related to DEI and gender, my colleagues at STAT report. They’re bad news for long-neglected research on topics like maternal health and the impacts of structural racism, and the breadth of possible trigger words means that even unrelated research may get targeted. “Bias is a word commonly used in statistics. Diversity could refer to bees or the microbiome, or galaxies … The way they are doing it is banning all science. The tools are so blunt,” psychology professor Darby Saxbe told STAT. Read more from my colleagues Usha Lee McFarling, Angus Chen, Sarah Owermohle, Jonathan Wosen, and Anil Oza.
‘The doctor indicted for prescribing abortion pills saved my life’
When Maya Gottfried was 35 years old, she started having abdominal pains and problems with her bowels. First her nutritionist (who was also a doctor) put her on a cleanse, but the symptoms didn’t go away. Her primary care doctor, however, took the problem seriously — directing Gottfried to a gastroenterologist and ultimately helping her get a swift diagnosis with stage 3 colorectal cancer.
“Without Dr. Maggie’s intervention at that time in my disease’s progression, the cancer would have continued to spread; my chance of survival diminished,” Gottfried writes.
The physician she calls Dr. Maggie is Margaret Carpenter, a New York-based doctor indicted in Louisiana for prescribing abortion pills to a teenager in the state, where abortion is almost completely banned. Just yesterday, a Texas judge also ordered Carpenter to stop sending abortion pills to women in Texas and fined her $100,000; the case is expected to wind its way to the Supreme Court. Read more on Carpenter’s impactful career, including founding an organization to help prevent cervical cancer abroad, and how she came to face criminal charges.
What we’re reading
- Federal judge blocks Trump order on health care for transgender youth, AP
- After abortion bans, infant mortality and births increased, research finds, New York Times
- U.S. scientists, unnerved by policy changes, may yearn for escape — but find limited opportunity, STAT
- Health insurers deny 850 million claims a year. The few who appeal often win, Wall Street Journal
- A sandwich killed my mom, Grub Street