Theresa Gaffney is the lead Morning Rounds writer and a podcast producer at STAT. You can reach Theresa on Signal at theresagaff.97. Get your daily dose of health and medicine every weekday with STAT’s free newsletter Morning Rounds.
Sign up here. Good morning. I’ll refrain from sharing my opinions about the cast list for season 50 of Survivor — too complex for a blue box.
But let me remind you about another iconic group of all stars: STAT’s annual list of Wunderkinds. Nominations are now open for early career researchers doing important work. advertisement HHS cancels massive Moderna contract for flu pandemic vaccines HHS has notified Moderna that it is canceling a nearly $600 million contract with the company to develop, test, and license vaccines for flu strains that could trigger future pandemics, including the dangerous H5N1 bird flu virus, STAT’s Helen Branswell reports.
The move, while anticipated as a possibility since February, will be seen as a serious blow to the country’s capacity to respond to pandemic influenza. No other flu vaccine production approach can produce doses with the speed of the messenger RNA platform used by Moderna and other companies that work with mRNA. Read more from Helen.
Texas lawmakers vote for school vaccine exemptions Earlier this week, Texas lawmakers approved a bill that would make it much easier for parents to enroll their children in school without standard vaccinations for diseases like measles, whooping cough, polio, and hepatitis A and B. The move comes in the wake of the country’s largest measles outbreak in more than 20 years, which has sickened more than 700 people in Texas. Two unvaccinated children in the state have died.
advertisement “The outbreak (in Texas) is not a coincidence. It is the canary in the coal mine screaming at the top of its lungs,” Rekha Lakshmanan, chief strategy officer for Texas-based nonprofit Immunization Project, said to state senators. Read more from the AP about the bill, which is on its way to the governor.
Meanwhile, other communities are rejecting this type of legislation. In a new First Opinion essay, a communications expert and public health advocate from North Dakota write about how the state defeated nine anti-vaccine bills over the past three years. In the essay, they walk through the framework they built to fight the misinformation that’s often built into these bills.
Read more. Doctors from the best med schools don’t practice in these areas In 2015, doctors who attended the top 20 ranked medical schools had 52% lower odds of going on to practice in socioeconomically deprived areas as compared to those from lower-ranked schools, according to a study published yesterday in JAMA Network Open. Those odds persisted five years later in 2020, the authors found.
The analysis, which included CMS data for more than 83,800 doctors, could not pinpoint reasons for the trend. The authors pointed to the likelihood of limited resources, lower earning potential, and fewer opportunities for professional development in struggling communities as potential factors. AI-based mammography is here.
Human radiologists are skeptical There’s growing excitement around several FDA-approved AI tools that can analyze mammograms — with some research finding the algorithms do the job better than human radiologists. But the humans have some concerns, as STAT’s Katie Palmer reports. “We have to be very careful what we do with AI once it’s out in the wild,” said Etta Pisano, chief research officer at the American College of Radiology.
And the tools are out there: RadNet, a company that owns more than 400 radiology practices, says it deploys its own algorithm in 600,000 mammograms each year. And it just acquired another company, iCAD, which claims 17% of U.S. radiology practices as customers. Still, those numbers pale in comparison to the 40 million mammograms analyzed by people every year.
Read more from Katie on where expert skepticism comes from. advertisement She’s so persuasive, that marijuana — and maybe bad for heart health As a growing number of states legalize the use of marijuana, researchers and public health advocates still have a number of questions about the drug’s long-term health effects. A study published yesterday in JAMA Network Open found that people who have smoked weed or used edibles for years do worse on some measures of vascular health that are used to predict cardiovascular risk.
The study analyzed each participants’ arterial flow-mediated dilation (FMD), which is a measure of how much an artery opens up for increased blood flow — the higher the better when it comes to cardiovascular risk. Out of 55 study participants, both the group that smoked weed and those who used edibles had lower FMD than those who did not. The participants were otherwise healthy, and none of them smoked tobacco or vaped.
The authors also looked at the patients’ carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity (PWV) and analyzed their blood serum. There were no changes to PWV, and only smoking weed, not edible use, was associated with negative changes in the blood serum. A previous study of 35 people did not find this sort of reduced FMD among chronic cannabis users, but did find worsened PWV.
The new study’s authors say the discrepancy may be due to less frequent use of the drug by the other study’s participants. People in the new study smoked weed three times a week for at least a year, and on average a decade, whereas the previous study recruited participants who smoked once per week. One thing is clear: More research is needed.
A former FDA commissioner on Trump’s ‘cost-cutting’ measures During his first administration, President Trump often touted that he had approved “more affordable generic drugs than any administration in history.” In a new First Opinion essay, Scott Gottlieb argues that the president had good reason to highlight these accomplishments, but that the cuts being made now could jeopardize any progress that’s been made. He writes from experience — Gottlieb was FDA commissioner for two years during Trump’s first administration. In those years, he says the FDA invested in staffing and policies with the goal of ensuring that once patents on expensive branded medications expired, lower-cost generics would become available as soon as possible.
advertisement Now, the FDA team responsible for paving the way for these complex generics has been entirely disbanded. “These substantial accomplishments risk being severely undermined, if not completely reversed, should the targeted dismantling of this critical generic drug policy team be allowed to endure,” Gottlieb writes. Read more.
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