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good morning. There’s already been a lot of notable news this week, but if you have a chance to rewind to September, revisit Eric Budman’s story on Post-Tubal Ligation Syndrome and consider why some women seek reversal of a procedure that is supposed to be irreversible. Eric was just shortlisted as a finalist in the long-form category at the National Magazine Awards. This is a first for STAT in this category.
Find out about “The Godfather of Vaccines”
Stanley Plotkin, 93, has been so influential in vaccine development that he even named the field’s go-to textbook after him. And they didn’t do it yesterday — “Plotkin’s vaccine” has eight editions, and the ninth is in preparation. But you can’t catch a guy taking a victory lap.
“All I can say is that I’m starting to regret living this long,” he recently told STAT’s Helen Branswell. “It’s all downhill.” Plotkin was a practicing physician in 1957 and remembers an earlier era when it was impossible to prevent many infectious diseases that many of us had never encountered.
Read the profile of Helen, a living legend in vaccinology. Start the story to gain insight into Plotkin’s contributions to public health. Find out how old he was when he got his pilot’s license (“I loved flying and thought it was easy”) and what the license plate on his vanity said.
Swine flu incidents to monitor
Spanish health authorities have announced that an 83-year-old man with no known contact with pigs has been diagnosed with swine flu. The person has reportedly recovered. The concern here is that such cases could signal undetected human-to-human spread of a potentially pandemic virus. But Spanish authorities said on Friday they believed the risk to the public was “very low” and that if the spread had continued, it would have been detected in the ongoing investigation. They notified the WHO and shared the virus with the organization’s reference laboratory.
The United States typically sees several cases of swine flu each year, most among pig workers and people attending agricultural shows. However, occasionally cases are reported that are not linked to pigs. Although such a case may be a one-off, all such cases should be investigated. As it turns out, in the spring of 2009, swine flu was detected in California in two children who had no contact with pigs or pigs. That was the beginning of the h2N1 pandemic. — Helen Branswell
Few mental health clinics offer services in Asian languages
Accessing mental health care in the United States is becoming increasingly difficult for people who speak an Asian language (such as Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Korean, or Tagalog) but have limited English proficiency. The study analyzed 10 years of nationally representative data on more than 3,800 mental health facilities and county-level demographics, according to findings published Friday in JAMA Health Forum.
The number of mental health clinics offering services in at least one Asian language peaked at 6.9% in 2021, but declined to 6.3% by 2024. These services were more common in cities, especially California and the Northeast. But the needs extend further. Researchers found that in rural areas, few if any clinics offer services in Asian languages, even in counties with strong communities of people who primarily speak Asian languages. The study authors called this a “persistent geographic mismatch.”
Significant uncertainty regarding drug pricing in Europe
President Trump’s campaign to get rich European countries to spend more on drugs while the United States pays less has not gone unnoticed. “No one wants to feel cornered,” said Yannis Natsis, head of the European Social Insurance Platform, which represents national payers.
So far, there is little evidence that drug prices in Europe have actually risen. Still, countries face questions about whether drug companies hoping to boost spending in the region will try to charge extra fees, and if so, how strained health systems will respond. Read more from STAT’s Europe correspondent Andrew Joseph.
Most people now widely understand that playing American football can pose serious risks to brain health. However, existing studies that attempt to uncover details are often small, limited to elite athletes, lack appropriate control groups, or lack all of the above. The study, published Friday in JAMA Network Open, aimed to provide higher quality evidence.
Using surveillance data from hundreds of men over the age of 40, researchers found that those who had played soccer generally had worse scores on computerized cognitive tests, were more concerned about their own cognition, and reported more severe symptoms of depression than those who had never experienced repeated head impacts. In another cohort of about 4,000 former soccer players with experience ranging from youth leagues to professional players, players who played longer and at a higher level had worse cognitive and neuropsychiatric function.
Read Reddit’s tea leaves on ketamine
At first it was personal. A year ago, Michael Alvear was given esketamine at a clinic supervised by a doctor. When his insurance denied coverage for long-term maintenance therapy, he turned to Reddit to find affordable alternatives. “Instead,” he writes in his new First Opinion essay, “we found a patient-run digital triage department.”
Some telemedicine companies send oral ketamine to patients at home. On Reddit, Alvear found that users were comparing wildly different instructions from different providers and using the site’s upvote feature to ponder serious side effects. An independent researcher, he decided to pause his personal plans and analyze six months of posts and comments. Read more about his results and why he thinks these companies are abdicating their responsibility.
what we are reading
- President Kennedy announces new members of vaccine advisory committee after rescheduled meeting, STAT
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White House delays release of approved US science budget, Nature
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Disability advocacy group says Medicaid freeze could lead to death, homelessness, MPR News
- Henrietta Lacks’ estate settles with Novartis over ‘stolen cells’ that advanced science, Associated Press
- More Americans under 55 are dying from severe heart attacks, Wall Street Journal
- First opinion: Marijuana is becoming more legal — unless you’re pregnant, STAT
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