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I simply returned from a beautiful two-week distant work/trip journey to Oregon and this meme is my mood today.
Should you love a well being care meme, take a look at the weekly Meme Ward in my colleague Bob Herman’s e-newsletter Well being Care, Inc. It usually goes out Mondays, however will exit this upcoming Tuesday due to Labor Day.
Talking of Labor Day, don’t neglect that you may get 25% off your first year of STAT+ with the code LABORDAY, good by Sep. 3. Now on to the information.
Three dairy farms in California present process testing for H5N1
California, the nation’s largest milk producer, is investigating three herds for attainable H5N1 outbreaks. If confirmed, these could be the primary confirmed circumstances within the state.
Herds in California are much less in danger for the an infection unfold than in another states, STAT’s Megan Molteni tells us, however many have feared that eventually, H5N1 would come to California.
“It appeared prefer it is perhaps solely a matter of time,” stated Terry Lehenbauer, a bovine illness epidemiologist and director of the Veterinary Medication Educating and Analysis Heart on the College of California, Davis.
What RFK as Trump public well being adviser would appear like
Former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is angling for a spot in a possible new Trump administration, pitching himself as a public well being man.
Despite the fact that he’s linked an increase in continual illness, significantly amongst kids, to vaccines, he’s lately tried to distance himself from these statements. He instructed Home lawmakers throughout a listening to final September he has “by no means been anti-vax.”
RFK’s remarks and marketing campaign supplies point out that he has plans for the FDA, together with overhauling the consumer payment construction and requiring extra security research on vaccines. He would change the NIH’s focus from infectious illness to continual illness prevention, together with “poisonous chemical compounds (PFAS, glyphosate, neonics, and so forth.), air and water air pollution, microplastics, electromagnetic air pollution, ultra-processed meals, and pharmaceutical merchandise.” He would pursue authorized motion in opposition to scientific journals for “publishing pretend science to advertise the mercantile ambitions” of assorted industries, together with meals and pharma.
STAT’s Isabella Cueto and Sarah Owermohle have an evaluation of RFK’s positions and a fact-check from well being specialists evaluating his claims. Learn extra.
Maternity ward closings aren’t solely taking place in rural areas
A lot of areas have changed into maternity care deserts as hospitals shut costly labor and supply wards. However whereas we popularly consider these closings as taking place in rural areas and worsening city–rural well being disparities, STAT contributor Marissa Evans brings us information of the maternity ward desert rising in Los Angeles County.
Since 2021, 29 hospitals in California stopped delivering infants. Of the almost 50 obstetrics departments which have closed over the previous decade, 17 have been in Los Angeles County.
For pregnant individuals, it’s troublesome to determine the place to go and the best way to get a brand new care group, particularly when close by hospitals aren’t outfitted to tackle a high-risk being pregnant. And as one may think, the hospitals closing down labor and supply models usually serve Black and brown populations.
“We couldn’t be as dismissive [of maternity ward closures] if it wasn’t [happening in] an overwhelmingly Black and brown neighborhood,” stated Raena Granberry, director of maternal and reproductive well being for the California Black Girls’s Well being Challenge. Learn extra.
Weight problems drug additionally lower threat of dying from Covid
Final 12 months, the hotly anticipated Choose trial from Novo Nordisk confirmed that the weight problems drug Wegovy had cardiovascular advantages past simply weight reduction — lowering the general fee of main coronary heart issues like coronary heart assaults, stroke, or cardiovascular-related loss of life by 20%.
The Choose trial ran for 5 years, and the Covid-19 pandemic began in the course of it. Realizing that the sufferers within the Choose trial — who have been chubby or had weight problems and had coronary heart illness — have been extra susceptible to extreme Covid, researchers began monitoring Covid-related outcomes too.
“We realized that this was an unprecedented well being occasion, and realized that we had the chance to probably contribute to science,” examine writer Benjamin Scirica instructed STAT.
On the European Society of Cardiology’s annual assembly in London, researchers unveiled evaluation exhibiting that Wegovy lower the possibilities of dying from Covid-19 by roughly a 3rd. Although sufferers contracted Covid on the similar fee as placebo contributors, 65 sufferers on placebo died from Covid, in comparison with 43 of these on the examine drug.
Learn extra from STAT’s Andrew Joseph.
Carbon emissions per puff: A better have a look at inhalers
Whereas one may consider overly air-conditioned hospitals and single-use medical provide waste as an even bigger driver of well being care carbon emissions, researchers are how bronchial asthma and COPD inhalers may be greener.
The most typical kinds of inhalers, the traditional “metered-dose” ones, use propellant gases to aerosolize medication that sufferers inhale. However these gases — which converted from ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons within the 2000s to the present hydrofluorocarbons — are greenhouse gases extra highly effective than carbon dioxide and contribute closely to local weather change.
In a brand new JAMA analysis letter, Stanford allergist and immunologist Jyothi Tirumalasetty and colleagues checked out how a lot Medicare and Medicaid have been paying for inhalers in 2022 — and what number of carbon equivalents they emitted.
Learn my Q&A with Tirumalasetty for what Midwestern metropolis’s electrical energy consumption is just like the emissions from inhalers, and what pharmacy profit supervisor formularies should do with carbon emissions.
What Monica from ‘Buddies’ has to do with PubMed
If you search “Marsha Reyngold” on PubMed, you received’t discover the Memorial Sloan Kettering doctor’s first-author publication from 2007, when she used her married identify of Marsha Laufer. (She’s since switched again to utilizing her present identify when publishing.)
Despite the fact that she’s registered each names to her ORCID writer identifier quantity, PubMed doesn’t search by ORCID except the searcher particularly places it in, and solely attracts up outcomes primarily based on identify. This disadvantages many individuals, particularly girls, who usually tend to change their names after marriage, the Nationwide Civil Liberties Affiliation argues in a new lawsuit.
The NCLA is suing the Division of Well being and Human Providers and the Nationwide Institutes of Well being, which runs PubMed, over this concern, stating that the Web Film Database is able to mentioning “Buddies” actress Courteney Cox’s filmography whenever you search “Courtney Arquette,” and the identical for judges within the Westlaw database.
“As a result of search leads to PubMed don’t return Dr. Reyngold’s full scientific contribution, she is deprived when making use of for numerous scientific grants, conferences, panel shows, and the like,” NCLA attorneys wrote.
Like a foul pupil, AlphaFold remains to be simply memorizing
Despite the fact that ChatGPT has been round for nearly two years, it and different synthetic intelligence chatbots nonetheless wrestle to inform how many “r”s are in the word “strawberry.” Why? These fashions aren’t actually utilizing reasoning to reply your query.
Organic AI fashions undergo from an analogous downside, a current study in Nature Communications says. One of many pinnacles of AI within the life sciences is AlphaFold, an AI platform developed by DeepMind that in 2020 primarily solved the issue of predicting a protein’s construction from its amino acid sequence. Touted as a discovery that can velocity up drug growth and that’s quickly enhancing, AlphaFold is an achievement…however nonetheless isn’t reasoning but.
When given a sequence for a protein that may fold into two completely different buildings, the AI didn’t precisely predict each buildings for 65% of the proteins for which it had coaching knowledge. For seven proteins it hadn’t seen earlier than, it failed on six of them, main researchers to conclude that regardless of its good efficiency on most duties, AlphaFold hasn’t realized the underlying physics of protein folding; it’s simply memorized info and typically even favors that memorization over info suggesting various solutions.
What we’re studying
- The case of the almost 7,000 lacking pancreases, Vox
- He obtained a brand new coronary heart. Now this 34-year-old is preventing to repair the transplant system, Wall Street Journal
- Bugs, mildew and mildew present in Boar’s Head plant linked to lethal listeria outbreak, CBS News
- Ideas, takes, and burning biotech questions as the start of the tip of the 12 months approaches, STAT
- Tribal meals help program in shambles after USDA warehouse consolidation, Buffalo’s Fire
- ‘It was stolen from me’: Black medical doctors are compelled out of coaching applications at far greater charges than white residents, STAT
