| | | |   | | | | | What should HHS do about environmental justice?  Bennie Hudson pours boiling water into her sink before washing dishes at her Jackson, Miss., home in September. (Rogelio V. Solis/AP) HHS’s environmental justice office launched in May with a presidential order and Sharunda Buchanan, a longtime CDC staffer tasked with shaping what federal health officials could do about amorphous, sweeping environmental health problems.
Four months later, not too much has changed. Neither Buchanan’s mission or the overarching Office of Climate Change and Health Equity have funding. And if the climate change department is a tiny outfit with a lofty goal, its environmental justice arm is on an Apollo mission.
Even if the team can figure out what they want to accomplish, experts wonder how effectively they will be able to do so, since the agency lacks not just staff and money, but also regulatory authority over environmental quality, zoning, and other community structures. Congressional midterms and the next presidential election are also on the horizon, meaning the Office of Environmental Justice may have less than two years to justify its entire existence.
Some health agencies’ environment-linked work is more direct: The Administration for Children and Families, for instance, already issues subsidies to help low-income families with energy bills. Others are far more tenuous — what role, for instance, should environmental factors play in FDA reviews?
“I have visions of grandeur for a lot of things we want to do. Of course, that's going to take time,” said Buchanan. “Slow and easy wins the race,” but, she admits, “I would like for the pace to go a little bit faster.” More here. | Michelle McMurry-Heath is (mostly) out as BIO’s CEO After a turbulent tenure, Michelle McMurry-Heath has stepped down from her position as the Biotechnology Innovation Organization’s CEO, the group announced after a special board meeting Monday night, my colleague Rachel Cohrs reports.
She’s not completely departing the organization, however — she’s staying on as an adviser to the board’s executive committee. That panel said they would launch a search for a replacement.
The interim CEO is BIO board member Rachel King. King founded clinical-stage biotech company GlycoMimetics, and served as chair of BIO’s board of directors from 2013-2015. King also serves on the board of Novavax.
The departure comes shortly after the news broke that McMurry-Heath was on leave this weekend. She was representing the organization publicly at an event in Philadelphia as recently as Thursday. STAT previously reported on tensions within BIO and McMurry-Heath’s clashes with the board of directors over various issues, including the group’s approach to drug pricing policy and advocacy on social justice issues. | Early detection can make all the difference in beating breast cancer Breast cancer is the most prevalent form of cancer among women globally. According to the WHO, in 2020 alone, 2.3 million women worldwide were diagnosed with breast cancer and 685,000 women died from the disease.1 Hologic is dedicated to transforming breast cancer screening and diagnosis to ensure radiologists can find even the most invasive cancers at the earliest stage possible. Learn how Hologic is making health a priority at every stage of a woman’s life. | Maternal care deserts grow as options dry up  (Molly Ferguson for STAT)
Seven million women across the country live in areas of limited or no access to maternity health care services, a number inching upwards amid a maternal health crisis and parallel battles over reproductive rights, my colleague Theresa Gaffney reports.
The number of counties considered maternal care deserts — places without obstetric providers or obstetric care in local hospitals — has grown 2% since 2020, according to a March of Dimes report this week. One of the driving factors is a simple one that residents of rural areas have noticed for years, Theresa writes: hospital closures. In 2020, 19 rural hospitals closed. It’s the continuation of a long-running trend — since 2005, over 180 rural hospitals across the country have closed.
These care deserts are also disproportionately found in states that restrict abortion; meanwhile pregnant people in those regions are more likely to be poor and have health conditions that contribute to higher-risk pregnancies like hypertension or asthma.
“It seems ironic that you would both create a system where people were sometimes forced to remain pregnant and forced to give birth, and that in those very same places, there would be a disinvestment in the health care facilities to care for people having babies,” said Cindy Colen, a professor and vice-chair of sociology at Ohio State University. More from Theresa here. | Texas reminds Washington it’d still really, really like ARPA-H The Texas delegation to Congress thinks Renee Wegrzyn, the inaugural director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, would really like the Lone Star State.
Both senators and 34 representatives penned a letter to Wegrzyn last week, congratulating her for the role while listing all Texas has to offer the $1 billion-dollar agency envisioned as a Pentagon-style approach to the hardest health care challenges.
The state’s “uniquely equipped” for the new agency with major cities, universities, and hospital networks, a diverse workforce and even office space, the lawmakers wrote.
The Texans make their case even amid questions about whether the agency’s big budget and eventual workforce will be concentrated in one area or scattered across the country’s best research labs. That’s not stopping state delegations though: California, Ohio, Georgia and North Carolina have mounted similar campaigns. | What we're reading - The vulnerability of Jon Fetterman after a stroke during a high-stakes Senate race, New York Magazine.
- A doctor’s humbling journey treating long Covid: ‘The second we think we know what we are doing, we fall flat on our face,’ STAT
- HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra has already talked to FDA about a marijuana scheduling review, Marijuana Moment
- Opinion: Congress is missing a rare opportunity to improve FDA policies and help people with deadly illnesses, STAT
| | | Thanks for reading! More on Thursday,  | |
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