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Transforming organ transplantation
When you imagine what an organ transplant is like, you probably picture a medical worker holding onto an igloo cooler, fresh from a helicopter. People of a certain generation may perhaps imagine the classic scene from One Tree Hill, where one of those workers trips and Dan’s heart slides across the hospital floor and is eaten by the dogs. (Sorry, I know it’s early.)
Importantly, both of these photos are now outdated thanks to new techniques adopted over the past five years. Technological advances such as warm and cold perfusion, as well as ethically complex changes that determine how and when retrieval can begin, are transforming the field of organ donation. This has led to more people getting new organs with shorter waiting times and fewer people dying while on the transplant waiting list. But as STAT’s Elizabeth Cooney reports, experts remain concerned about equitable access and the much higher cost. Read more about what these new techniques are, where they’re happening, and what’s next.
CDC staff with disabilities continue to lack accommodations
CDC employees with disabilities continue to struggle to get the accommodations they need even after their telecommuting authorization was temporarily revoked in September, according to a letter from Yolanda Jacobs, president of American Federation of Public Employees Local 2883, which represents CDC employees, to Jay Bhattacharyya, director of the NIH and acting CDC director.
“This is not a policy debate. This is an issue of employee safety, regulatory compliance, and organizational health that is causing real and ongoing harm,” Jacobs said in a letter sent Thursday. She added that employees are experiencing “acute medical events directly caused by the sudden loss of accommodations,” including disabled veterans who have been hospitalized and forced to take time off. Some people are classified as AWOL because their disability limits their ability to go to the office. On CDC campuses, employees who need equipment such as lighting adjustments or different chairs have to wait months for approval, Jacobs wrote.
Jacobs continued that neither HHS’ official policy nor President Trump’s executive order to return to in-person work required CDC to cancel existing accommodations. He also noted that CDC staff received a copy of the new policy only after STAT’s O. Rose Broderick obtained it and reported its details in December.
HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon told STAT that Jacobs’ claims are inaccurate. “Telework is permitted in appropriate cases as an interim measure while requests are processed, and we are addressing requests as quickly as possible,” Nixon said in an email. “Claims that employees are being sent back to the office without accommodations or that the department is ignoring disability protections are simply false.”
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The age at which people should start considering statins and other measures to manage cholesterol has been lowered from 40, according to new guidelines released Friday by leading medical organizations. The latest recommendations take a more comprehensive approach to when and how to prevent and treat cardiovascular disease caused by hardening and narrowing of the arteries. “I don’t appreciate this story,” one 30-year-old STAT reporter said Friday. Nevertheless, to understand the changes, read further in this important report from Liz.
What would happen if “The Fugitive” was real?
In honor of last night’s Oscars ceremony, Alex Hogan’s latest video examines a very important issue. How would a STAT reporter react if the events depicted in Best Picture winner The Fugitive happened more than 30 years ago?
In the film, a doctor played by Harrison Ford discovers that a fictional pharmaceutical giant is falsifying data to gain approval for a blockbuster treatment for coronary artery disease. “I don’t know how up-to-date it was at this point,” Matt Harper told Alex. “This movie was released the year before the big study that proved statins prevented second heart attacks.”
How will STAT approach this news? When asked how to approach the initial allegations, Damien Garde initially replied, “We just need to turn the pyramid upside down.” Watch the video to hear how he writes that first story lead, and what reporting steps Bob Herman, Lizzie Lawrence, and Alison DeAngelis take first to dig deeper.
Should maternal morbidity surveillance be expanded?
By 2017, all U.S. states included a checkbox on death certificates to indicate whether a person was pregnant at the time of death or within a year after death. Although the system is imperfect, it helped clarify the scale of the problem. In a study published today in the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association, researchers argue that similar expansion is needed to capture the prevalence of severe maternal morbidity, meaning the most severe pregnancy complications that can cause death, prolonged hospitalization, or postnatal disability.
In both the United States and Canada, investigation and reporting of these complications typically ends after delivery. But a new study analyzing data from an Ontario cohort up to six weeks postpartum finds that current practice misses more than 40 per cent of cases with severe complications. A similar study in the United States found that including the perinatal period in morbidity surveys could identify an additional 22% to 49% of severe cases.
Declaration of hope, dashed line
Mindy Uraub learned she carried the mutated gene that causes the deadly neurodegenerative disease ALS after her mother died from the disease. It was a dark time, but over the years she trusted researchers and other activists and participated in more than a dozen observational studies. “Each time I suffered a spinal tap and endured a nerve conduction study, I told myself I was getting closer to healing,” Uraub writes in a new first opinion essay. It was a “tremendous declaration of hope.”
However, everything changed with the inauguration of the second Trump administration. Read more about the terrifying sequence of events in Uraub’s own words.
what we are reading
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Florida tries to ignore measles until it can no longer be ignored, The Atlantic
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Book reviews since Dobbs, New York
- Opinion: Congress needs to pass legislation to ensure Medicare covers breakthrough medical technologies, STAT
- Why do mind-altering drugs make me feel better? New Yorker
