In a debate about the best fruit, my STAT colleague Alexa Lee and I both agreed that peaches have fallen in the middle of nowhere in recent years. Is this just a New York City problem? Dial in your fruity feelings.
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Supreme Court upholds mail-order access to mifepristone
At this time, it is legal to buy abortion pills by mail.
Three days after extending its own decision deadline, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked a federal appeals court’s ruling that women seeking abortions must see a doctor in person. Yesterday’s court ruling is not the end of this heady legal saga, but it does ensure access to mifepristone while the case progresses. The justices issued a 7-2 ruling, with Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissenting. The latter suggested that mailing mifepristone was a “criminal enterprise.”
If you’re confused about this case, which has had many twists and turns, and its broader implications for drug control, read Teresa’s story from last week.
Africa CDC declares Ebola outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo
African health authorities on Friday confirmed an outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ituri province, with 246 suspected cases and 65 deaths already reported.
Early test results suggest the outbreak is caused by a strain of Ebola other than the Zaire strain, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. The licensed vaccine is the only one that protects against Ebola, but there are also experimental vaccinations for other species.
The Africa CDC said sequencing is underway to identify the strain.
The agency cited a number of reasons for its concern, including infection prevention and control challenges, as well as the spread of infection in urban areas, people moving from region to region for work, and regional security and conflict. The outbreak is occurring near the border between Uganda and South Sudan.
The Africa CDC announced today that it will convene a meeting with global and regional health authorities, vaccine and drug developers, philanthropic organizations, and others.
Ituri was one of the states affected by the second-largest Ebola outbreak in history from 2018 to 2020. — Andrew Joseph
The violent effects of President Trump’s foreign aid cuts
The week after President Trump took office for the second time, his administration swiftly dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, one of the world’s largest providers of international aid, including much of the medical aid. The legacy of this withdrawal has been extensively documented, but new scientific analysis adds to what we know. In other words, regions that received more USAID assistance have dealt with more violent conflicts since USAID disbanded.
New research released yesterday shows that regions that receive the most aid from the United States are 6.5 percent more likely to experience conflict than regions that receive no aid from the United States. This includes an approximately 10% increase in riot- and combat-related deaths. Click here to learn more about the research.
What is a “qualified” medical school applicant?
Yesterday, the Department of Justice sent a letter to Yale School of Medicine, accusing it of illegally discriminating against applicants who are not black or Hispanic. This is the Trump administration’s latest move to rein in DEI efforts to diversify the scientific workforce, but experts say it inadvertently revives the debate about what it means to be a qualified physician.
The uproar began after a 2023 Supreme Court ruling banning the use of affirmative action in admissions decisions, but the Trump administration accused the medical school of continuing discriminatory practices, citing disparities in average test scores and GPAs between students of different racial groups over the past three admissions cycles. The Justice Department sent a similar letter to the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine last week.
Read more about the aftermath of the letter from STAT’s Anil Oza.
Why is alcohol not considered a public health emergency?
We’ve already brought you several articles from STAT’s latest series on how alcohol is causing an epidemic of injury, illness, and death in the United States. Alex Hogan spoke to the authors of this series, Lev Fascher and Isabella Cueto, about their biggest takeaways from months of interviews. Look here.
MIT loses research funding to graduate students
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) research operations are 10% smaller than they were a year ago, according to President Sally Kornbluth, as the university grapples with a lack of federal funding and policy changes. The chancellor also warned of a sustained decline in graduate school enrollment in a video posted to YouTube yesterday.
Kornbluth said challenges include the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to higher education reform, increased taxes on large university endowments, and changes in immigration policy that prevent international students from applying to the school. MIT is facing a $300 million deficit and has already closed its library and reduced undergraduate enrollment.
Read more about the significant headwinds facing MIT.
Craig Venter tribute hole
Two weeks ago, genomics legend Craig Venter passed away. A self-proclaimed maverick, he was undoubtedly one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. Obituaries poured in, including a poignant reflection from STAT’s Matt Harper. But there’s something missing from these obituaries, writes Zach Utz, a former archivist at the NIH National Human Genome Research Institute.
When Mr. Venter’s company, Celera, announced in the 1990s that it would beat the publicly funded Human Genome Project in a race to generate the first sequence of the human genome using whole-genome shotgun methods, it was touted as a race between powerful private scientists and slow-moving bureaucracies. Venter’s posthumous story repeats that false dichotomy.
See Utz’s article on how Celera’s moonshot was only made possible by public data from the NIH.
what we are reading
- President Trump requests Medicaid data for deportation purposes. Some states go a step further. , KFF Health News
- Judge blocks Trump administration’s request for records of transgender children from Rhode Island hospital, Associated Press
- The CDC plans to transfer the monkeys to a nonprofit sanctuary in an effort to reduce animal testing, STAT announced.
- U.S. reports no hantavirus cases due to cruise ship outbreak, 41 observers, Reuters
