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good morning. You may have noticed a missing link in yesterday’s issue. You can read Sarah Todd’s excellent article on ultra-processed food research and policy here.
Latest news on Ebola: number of cases, rebound
A hodgepodge of Ebola news: In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, samples from hundreds of suspected Ebola patients are being collected, and the outbreak is shrinking dramatically. As of Wednesday, the country reported 363 confirmed cases. At a WHO press conference, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said there were currently 116 suspected cases, and if confirmed, the number of infections would be just under 500, less than half the number thought late last week. But Craig Spencer, an Ebola survivor and public health professor at Brown University, told STAT that he has heard from people on the ground that there may still be many undetected cases.
American Federation of Public Employees Local 2883, the union representing CDC employees, has publicly opposed the Trump administration’s plan to force Americans exposed to Ebola to quarantine in Kenya. But when asked what he thought about the US plan, Ghebreyesus countered: “They can do whatever they think is right.” He also expressed gratitude for the United States’ “strong commitment” to efforts to stop the spread of the virus. — Helen Branswell
President Trump to strip job protections for NIH executives
President Trump yesterday issued an executive order redefining positions within the civil service, making changes that would make it easier to fire federal employees by classifying them as political appointees. This will affect many senior officials who oversee grant review and disbursements at the National Institutes of Health.
Biomedical researchers and policy experts denounced the change when it was proposed this spring. STAT’s Anil Oza has the latest details.
Scientists discover new hiding place for HIV
Scientists have long understood that HIV is an expert at evasion. The virus attacks the immune system by infiltrating white blood cells known as T cells, particularly those that express a surface protein called CD4. Once inside, that DNA is copied into the cell’s genome. Antiviral drugs can stop HIV from replicating, but when a patient stops taking antiviral drugs, the cells begin shedding HIV particles and the infection flares up again.
The real cure depends on finding and eliminating these latent reservoirs of HIV DNA. Researchers hope they will be able to send CRISPR into these cells to sever the HIV DNA hidden there, or to design immunotherapies to corner the cells.
Complicating these efforts, Chinese researchers have discovered that HIV has another trick up its sleeve. It can change the identity of infected cells. In a paper published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine, the research team reported that HIV may cause gene expression changes in T cells that turn off the CD4 protein and turn on a protein called CD8. The new findings challenge long-standing biological wisdom that the identity of T cells is fixed and expands the types of cells that need to be targeted to completely flush out HIV DNA from a patient’s body. — Megan Molteni
There’s a lot we don’t know about male adolescence.
We know that when girls reach early puberty, they are at increased risk for endometriosis, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer, eating disorders, and all-cause mortality. Research on the timing of puberty in men is much more preliminary, but early studies have found similar correlations between timing and adverse health effects. But some clinicians believe that better understanding of adolescence could be transformative, given the fact that men experience worsening health outcomes over the course of their lives.
“Increasing knowledge about the factors that regulate the timing of male puberty may hold the key to understanding men’s long-term health,” said pediatric endocrinologist Anders Juhl, who advocates for further research. STAT contributor Ashleigh N. DeLuca writes about this under-explored gap and what needs to happen next. read more.
Senate hearing reiterates issues on gender care
Yesterday’s Senate Health Committee hearing highlighted the persistent political debate over gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Questions and testimony remained largely on well-trodden ground.
Dissenting senators and witnesses all insisted that their position was supported by the American Medical Association. For example, Sen. Bill Cassidy cited an AMA media statement that said there was “insufficient” evidence for surgeries on trans minors. Sen. Bernie Sanders argued that the AMA supports affirmation of care. What is the truth? The AMA has a policy supporting gender-affirming care, which has not been rescinded. But the group, which wants to maintain friendly relations with the Trump administration, released the statement Cassidy referred to. The AMA subsequently requested corrections from the New York Times in particular and emphasized the importance of maintaining access.
Kurt Miceli, president of the anti-gender-affirming care and anti-DEI group Do No Harm, repeatedly asserted that most children who experience gender dysphoria grow out of it. However, a recent literature review of research on resistance found this claim to be “baseless” as most of it is decades old and the research is methodologically flawed and based on outdated assumptions.
Prominent transitioner Chloe Cole has spoken out about her experience with what she calls coercive medical abuse. Cole argued for a ban on gender-affirming care, arguing that “there is no such thing as a child being born in the wrong body.” Her Democratic senators’ opponents expressed sympathy for her experience but argued that a medical malpractice lawsuit was a better way to address the harm.
Transgender youth did not speak during the hearing, but Sen. Tim Kaine addressed them directly. “If you’re a transgender kid and you’re watching this hearing, there’s going to be a deliberate effort to make you feel bad about yourself, but you have a lot of people who love you,” he said.
AI scribe is used for documentation. Patients could too.
More than a quarter of U.S. medical practices use Ambient Scribe, an AI-based listening and note-taking tool. But now a growing number of developers are pitching apps that perform similar tasks directly on patients, remembering what doctors say, and offering extra help tracking multiple encounters across the health system.
As STAT’s Katie Palmer writes, every patient has a recording device in their pocket these days. However, these tools have already attracted significant investment and also raise data privacy concerns when health information is stored outside the provider’s domain. Read more from Katie about what these apps offer and the cultural and legal issues that come with them.
