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Another morning round, another double feature from STAT’s Helen Branswell. Teresa and I don’t keep track of this, but I’m pretty sure Helen keeps a record of newsletters that have more than one article.
US retreats from global health leadership as Ebola outbreak spreads
Trump administration officials confirmed Thursday that Americans infected with Ebola will not be brought to the United States for treatment. Instead, they will be evacuated to a yet-to-be-determined location in Europe, although there is a network of facilities in the United States specifically for this purpose.
Officials said moving infected people to Europe would get them faster treatment, but health experts criticized the move as another sign of a broader retreat from intervening and containing what is already the third-largest Ebola outbreak on record. Despite millions of dollars in federal funds being spent to address the situation, the priority appears to be protecting the United States from the disease.
Read more from STAT’s Helen Branswell.
One more note: This morning there was a twist in the US plan to build quarantine facilities in Kenya, with a Kenyan court blocking such efforts until a petition to the contrary is heard next week. Click here for details via AP.
WHO debates which vaccine will contain the Ebola outbreak?
The WHO yesterday laid out its thoughts on what drugs and vaccines should be tested in response to the Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak that has hit the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Ituri province and has partially spilled over into Uganda. There are no approved vaccines or treatments to prevent or treat the Bundibugyo strain, so experts suggest that anything used in the outbreak needs to undergo clinical trials to determine whether it is effective against this type of Ebola.
As for treatments, he suggested prioritizing Gilead’s antiviral drug remdesivir and two monoclonal antibodies: MBP134 from Map Biopharmaceutical and Regeneron’s maftivimab, which is approved to treat the Zaire Ebola virus. The committee recommended that Gilead’s antiviral drug oberdesivir be prioritized for testing to see if it prevents disease in people who may have been exposed to the virus. A Bundibugyo-specific vaccine is not currently available and will take several months to be manufactured.
There is interest in finding out whether Merck’s Zaire Ebola virus vaccine Elvevo offers any cross-protection (something that has been confirmed in primate tests), but the WHO said it should not be used outside of carefully designed clinical trials. — Helen Branswell
The woman who led the world’s largest longevity contest
Could a $101 million prize spur the development of treatments that can restore muscle, cognitive and immune function in older adults? Jamie Justice is betting he can do it. The academic-turned-longevity campaigner has launched a competition for 10 finalists to test their treatments in a year-long randomized clinical controlled trial before announcing the grand prize winner in 2030.
Justice’s superhero name and epic mission wouldn’t be out of place in a long-running field that attracts a wide variety of characters with outlandish theories. But her approach, which includes firing “purely fraudulent” companies that give longevity science a bad name, has drawn attention. Read on to find out what Justice told STAT’s Sarah Todd at the longevity conference Vitalist Bay.
Nature puts in place safeguards against data manipulation
Yesterday, Nature magazine announced that it would now accept “registered reports” in all areas in which it publishes. To date, registered reports have been primarily used for confirmatory research, primarily in the cognitive neurosciences, behavioral and social sciences.
These research proposals present the hypothesis, methods, and planned analysis of a particular research project. Researchers submit a paper to a journal before conducting an experiment, and if it is granted “in-principle acceptance,” the journal publishes the paper, regardless of whether the results were statistically significant (pending verification of protocol compliance and reasonable interpretation of the results).
Pre-registered protocols are published publicly in a repository, ensuring that researchers cannot bend or chop the results to fit a different narrative. We also encourage the publication of negative or inconclusive results that are noticeably lacking in the literature.
Want to know more? Read this edition of AI Prognosis, which explains why the scientific literature requires more negative and non-significant results. — Brittany Tran
Unknowns of GLP-1 microdosing
Jodi Duchey, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, writes that everyone is asking me whether they should microdose GLP-1 for cosmetic weight loss. However, microdosing of GLP-1 do not have There’s also no valid long-term data to back it up.
Direct-to-consumer companies selling combination products are promoting the idea of microdosing non-FDA-approved GLP-1 therapies at doses that are not based on the landmark trials that demonstrated the weight-loss efficacy of semaglutide and tirzepatide. The long-term cost of the small jab is unknown and there is no way to convert the dosage of a compounded product to genuine GLP-1, says the self-proclaimed weight loss doctor.
Read Duchey’s article to understand why scientists need to study the effects of small doses of these drugs before trumpeting their results in TV ads.
what we are reading
- HHS employee’s stock trading raises flag, NOTUS
- The form asked for permission to share my health data. Then you won’t be able to say no, The Markup
- The World Cup is a petri dish, Bloomberg
