When Philip Morris invests in health care, critics call it peddling cures for its poison

(mike reddy for stat)

It’s easy to imagine eyebrows rising after the financial backer of a new health care company was revealed last month. Vectura Fertin Pharma plans to leverage cutting-edge inhalation technology and oral delivery expertise to treat everything from asthma to cardiovascular emergencies. The multibillion-dollar company’s financing includes an investment from Philip Morris International, the tobacco behemoth whose cigarettes are sold in more than 180 countries.

Smoking still kills close to half a million Americans a year, but tobacco sales continue to dive. As PMI stares down projections of plummeting revenue streams, the company has been racking up patents and taking over health care companies, an unlikely pivot that has accelerated dramatically in the past year. “They’re producing the poison and selling the cure to you later on,” Sven-Eric Jordt of Yale told STAT’s Olivia Goldhill. “That’s heartbreaking.” Read her special report.

Juul to pay $438.5 million to settle over marketing vaping to young peope

After years of investigations by dozens of states into its sales and marketing practices, Juul Labs has agreed to pay $438.5 million to settle allegations it had tailored its vaping products to appeal to teenagers. The investigation found the company hired young models and leveraged social media to woo teenagers as it gave out free samples. While the company had an age verification system for its products in place, it was “porous,” the investigation said, because 45% of its social media followers were ages 13 to 17, the New York Times reported yesterday.

Juul did not acknowledge wrongdoing but said the settlement “is a significant part of our ongoing commitment to resolve issues from the past” and drew attention to vaping for people trying to quit smoking. The Associated Press has more here, and STAT has coverage here of the FDA’s attempts to regulate the vaping industry.

White House pitches Covid boosters as annual shots

The Biden administration wants us to think of the new bivalent Covid boosters as a first annual shot, just like the flu shot you should get every fall. Yesterday’s message is another sign from the White House that we’ve moved past the emergency phase of the pandemic, even though roughly 400 people still succumb to Covid every day in the U.S., with higher death rates among people who are unvaccinated and not boosted.

There are caveats: Some “variant curveball” could undermine the long-term vaccination plan, White House Covid-19 coordinator Ashish Jha said. Certain groups that remain vulnerable to severe outcomes from Covid might need more frequent boosting. And some experts argue the country is defaulting to annual Covid boosters without evidence to back it up. STAT’s Andrew Joseph has more.

Closer look: When masks are dropped for routine care, some patients are still vulnerable

(spencer platt/getty images)

People whose medical conditions compromise their immunity — or people who live with others whose age or immune status place them at increased risk for bad Covid-19 outcomes — are weary of a world that has simply moved on from wearing masks and isolating after exposure to the virus. Medical offices would seem to be the exception to before-times behavior. But as STAT’s Megan Molteni reports, that’s not the case. While there are evidence-based rules in hospitals, the science on the risks of respiratory infection transmission in outpatient settings is still far from settled. Meanwhile, patients pay the price.

“Even in clinics where the job is to provide care for people who are really high risk, you can’t even feel safe somewhere like that,” a 59-year-old kidney transplant recipient in Georgia said after visiting a nephrology clinic this summer where staff were unmasked in the waiting room. Read more.

Forehead thermometers may not work as well on darker skin

STAT’s Usha Lee McFarling has this report: Commonly used forehead thermometers may misread temperatures in patients with darker skin, leading to missed fevers, delayed diagnosis, and higher mortality, according to a new JAMA study. The paper comes amid increasing concern about racial disparities in pulse oximeters, widely used fingertip devices that may underestimate low oxygen levels in patients with darker skin.

The new study compared temperature readings in about 2,000 adult Black patients and about 2,300 adult white patients admitted to Emory hospitals in Georgia between 2014 and 2021. (There were too few Asian and Hispanic patients to analyze.) It found forehead temperature readings detected fever in about 10% of Black patients, while oral thermometer readings taken within an hour indicated fever existed in 13% of Black patients. For white patients, oral and forehead temperature readings were about the same.

While the authors said they were unsure if the differences were due to issues with forehead thermometers misreading temperatures due to skin pigment or misuse of the devices, they said the “discrepancy combined with commonly used fever cutoffs may lead to fever going undetected in many Black patients.”

Rates of mental health treatment rise, driven by increase among younger adults

The numbers are clear: The percentage of U.S. adults who received mental health treatment over the past 12 months — defined as medication or therapy from a mental health professional — went up from 2019 to 2021 (from 19.2% to 21.6%), a new CDC report tells us. The trend was most pronounced among adults age 18 to 44 (from 18.5% to 23.2%), consistent with previous research that found that symptoms of an anxiety or depressive disorder rose from 2020 through early 2021, especially among younger adults. Some details about who received more treatment:

Women from 18 to 44 were more likely than men to have any mental health treatment.
Rates went up among non-Hispanic white (from 23.8% to 30.4%) and non-Hispanic Asian (from 6% to 10.8%) adults.
The rise held up across metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas.

What to read around the web today

Google debuts a new AI tool in the global fight against tuberculosis, STAT
The fight to keep a little-known bacteria out of powdered baby formula, Washington Post
Pharma donations to patient charities may violate the ‘spirit’ of anti-kickback laws, STAT
An effort to ID Tulsa race massacre victims raises privacy issues, Wired
Amazon health feature can accurately assess users’ mobility, study finds, STAT
Matt's Take: Why Illumina has a merger mess of it own making, STAT