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good morning. After what at times seemed like endless speculation, FDA Commissioner Marty McCulley resigned from his position yesterday. Kyle Diamantas, the agency’s top food regulator, will serve as acting director. STAT’s Lizzy Lawrence has the details. And Matt Harper has a passionate opinion that Marty McCulley was the worst FDA Commissioner in the past 25 years.
Bill Cassidy’s Unwinnable Conundrum
McCurry may not be the only health policy leader in Washington to announce his resignation. Louisiana doctor and Sen. Bill Cassidy faces an arduous primary battle Saturday, with President Trump endorsing one of his challengers.
“He can cure cancer, but there’s still a chance he’ll lose the primary,” local Republican leader Kelby Daigle told STAT’s Chelsea Siluzzo and Daniel Payne. These are tough times for Mr. Cassidy, who should now be at the pinnacle of power after leading Republicans on health reform plans for nearly a decade.
Instead, he faces a political career battle for his legacy. Win or lose, he is unlikely to fully recover from his decline in stature as the changing political landscape requires Republicans to demonstrate unrelenting loyalty to President Trump, sources told STAT.
The senator’s future may hinge on two important votes he makes in 2021 and 2025. To understand how he made those decisions, Chelsea and Daniel traveled to Louisiana to interview key figures within Cassidy’s orbit. Check out our great report to learn more.
Men text 988 much less often than women.
Less than 20% of the 1.5 million messages Crisis Textline received in 2025 were from people who identified only as men, according to a new report. (The organization provides crisis assistance through the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline and around the world.) But that doesn’t mean men and boys need less help. The same analysis found that one in three conversations with boys under 14 mentioned suicide.
“Boys and men are socialized to equate independence with strength and to see asking for help as weakness,” said Tracy Costigan, author of the report. “And this is very much a conformity to traditional masculine norms.” Read more about the findings by STAT’s Annalisa Merelli here.
What RFK Jr. Gets Right and Wrong About Antidepressants
Last week, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced an initiative aimed at reducing the so-called overprescription of psychiatric drugs such as antidepressants.
Jonathan Slater is a clinical psychiatrist who has helped patients come off antidepressants, but he says the process is dynamic, individualized, and requires ongoing clinical judgment. He believes deprescribing is under-researched, under-educated and under-compensated. But he takes issue with Kennedy’s outlandish claims, such as when he claimed SSRIs are harder to quit than heroin.
“But Kennedy’s effort confuses that true clinical need with claims that are not supported by evidence and are clearly dangerous,” Slater writes in a new first-opinion essay.
Read more about the data on deprescribing and what one expert thinks is really needed.
A new kind of liver crisis
When Stephen Silva-Brave became a father at age 20, he put his college plans on hold to pursue a stable career in finance. Binge drinking was a major part of the culture and eventually led to drinking every night. He stopped at a gas station on his way home from work and bought a few bottles of Four Loko. One can of this infamous drink contained as much alcohol as five beers and twice as much sugar as a can of soda.
“That may have something to do with why I got cirrhosis so young,” said Silva Brave, who developed end-stage cirrhosis by the age of 32. But it wasn’t just drinking, he was living on highly processed snacks and 7-Eleven lunches. He sat on the couch every night without exercising. The main causes of liver disease are metabolic disorders and alcohol. But data increasingly suggests that a combination of the two will be the key driver.
In the first episode of “The Deadliest Drug,” STAT’s Isabella Cueto and Lev Fascher examine how alcohol is negatively impacting Americans’ health. The following article, published today, explores the increased risk of combining heavy drinking with pre-existing metabolic disease and poor eating habits. Read more about who is at risk and how it happens.
Heat waves are rapidly worsening for Black Americans
The number of hospitalizations due to the extreme heat is increasing across the United States. But a study published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that infection rates among Black adults are increasing faster than among white adults. And, on average, people living in zip codes with the lowest average incomes are more than twice as likely to be hospitalized due to heat than those living in the wealthiest areas.
Researchers analyzed data on adults hospitalized for heatstroke between May and September of each year from 1998 to 2022. In 1998, black people in many neighborhoods were hospitalized for heatstroke at the same rate as their white neighbors. But disparities widened, especially in the Midwest and West, with more than 80 black people per million people hospitalized due to heat in 2022, compared to about 60 white people per million people in the South and nearly 40 white people per million people in the West.
As former STAT editor Karen Penner reported in 2023, emergency doctors are preparing for future heatwaves by using all the tools at their disposal, including ice and freezers for body bags. And a First Opinion essay published this morning argues that access to air conditioning needs to be better prioritized in government assistance programs.
what we are reading
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The myth of long-term close contact in the Atlantic Ocean
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How a legal challenge over gender dysphoria became a fight for disability rights, Part 19
- Drugs meant to make gene therapy safer may also make it less effective, STAT
- Low wages, empty plates, and high tolls: Rethinking suicide prevention, KFF Health News
- Podcast: What does the ‘Blue Zones’ actually tell us about aging?Status
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