Living With: How MS helps guide this physical therapist's practice

(PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: CASEY SHENERY FOR STAT; PHOTO: COURTESY LEIGH KRAUSS)

For Leigh Krauss, her multiple sclerosis emerged suddenly at age 25, although her diagnosis didn't. A former college basketball player completing her education as a physical therapist, she suddenly lost vision in one eye, the first sign of the chronic autoimmune disease that interferes with signals between the brain and the rest of the body. Once diagnosed with MS, she continued her training, she told STAT’s Isabella Cueto, in part out of stubbornness.

Isa asked her for an example of how her diagnosis changes her work as a physical therapist now, nearly 10 years later. “It’s really hard to explain to someone that doesn’t know what chronic fatigue looks like,” she said. "There’s just a level of understanding that helps guide my clinical practice … because chronic fatigue impacts so many people that I see on a daily basis,” she said. Read more in the first of a series of articles that explore chronic illness, called “Living With.”

Former Merck CEO: ‘I think our democracy is in danger’

When former Merck CEO Ken Frazier steps down as chairman of the pharmaceutical giant on Thursday, his legacy will include leading the company that developed the blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda. People will also remember he withdrew from a business council advising President Donald Trump after white supremacist riots in Charlottesville, Va. Earlier this month Frazier spoke with Matthew Herper at the STAT Summit. Some highlights:

On the role of a pharma CEO: “Given the role of medicines in society and the ethics around medicine, my personal view is that pharma CEOs can’t simply take the attitude that they’re going to maximize financial outcomes.”
On other CEOs: “CEOs feel under pressure. The last thing they want to be called is a woke CEO. I ask people, what’s the opposite? An asleep CEO?"
On the political climate: “I think our democracy is in danger right now.”

Read the full interview.

Mukherjee: 'The gene is the score, the cell is the musician'

Siddhartha Mukherjee’s new book, “The Song of the Cell,” combines the history of how we understand the cell with personal reflections. The oncologist and biotech founder chatted with STATs Angus Chen about what inspired him.

This book follows your last one, “The Gene.” Why explore the cell?
The gene is the score; the cell is the musician that brings it to life. That’s the "song" of the cell.

You bring your experiences as a physician to how you understand the cell.
I’m simultaneously a biologist, cancer scientist, doctor, and a son: It’d be a strange book if those elements were not woven into the book. My own experience with depression leads to a [deep] examination of how neuronal cells achieve their very complex cognitive and other functions. There’s an incredible scene, almost from "Macbeth," in which I’m drenched in blood as a young resident from someone who is bleeding from varices.

Read more.

Closer look: Search for a universal flu vaccine gets closer to its target

(JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES)

It’s unusual for us to tell you about medicines tested only in animals, but this one is sparking cautious optimism. A study published recently in Science reports that an experimental influenza vaccine developed using messenger RNA technology appears capable of inducing what should be a protective immune response against all known subtypes of flu. If the work is translated into humans, it could turn out to be a version of a long-sought universal vaccine.

STAT’s Helen Branswell tells us it wouldn’t block all flu infections, nor would it replace the need for an annual flu shot. Instead, it would prime the immune system to better respond to new flu viruses, lowering the risk of hospitalization, death, and social disruption. The bottom line? Flu pandemics, in effect, would be defanged. Read more.

'It ain't over til it's over,' unless it's never over

It’s just as well a young Anthony Fauci was unaware that his chosen field of infectious diseases was predicted — thanks to vaccines and antibiotics — to soon become a backwater of medicine. That was back in the 1960s, when he was just starting a three-year combined fellowship in infectious diseases and clinical immunology at NIAID, where he would be a physician-scientist for 54 years and its director for 38. “That all changed in the summer of 1981 with the recognition of the first cases of what would become known as AIDS,” he notes in a NEJM perspective on the eve of his retirement that tracks many more emerging diseases since then.

Today, there is no reason to believe that the threat of emerging or re-emerging infections will diminish, he says. Then he quotes one of his favorite pundits, Yogi Berra: “It ain’t over till it’s over,” and amends it to say, “when it comes to emerging infectious diseases, it’s never over.”

One-third of Zika babies have a congenital abnormality, early childhood study says

It was 2018 when STAT’s Helen Branswell wrote that Zika had already faded from headlines, but the prenatal effects on Zika babies continue, in the shadow of Covid and years after Brazil's outbreak began in 2015. A study published today in The Lancet Regional Health – Americas takes what its authors call the most comprehensive look to date at Zika virus infection during the pregnancies of 1,548 women. About one-third of children exposed to the virus before they were born have at least one abnormality among those that make up congenital Zika syndrome, the authors conclude from 13 cohort studies.

The most frequent problems were functional neurological impairments, neuroimaging abnormalities, alterations in hearing and vision, and microcephaly. The risk of microcephaly — when the baby’s head is smaller than expected and the image we most often think of — was 2.6% at birth or first evaluation, rising to 4% in the early preschool years.

What we're reading

Second death linked to potential antibody treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, Science
Endgame: How the visionary hospice movement became a for-profit hustle, The New Yorker
The mismeasure of Misha, Boston Globe
UPMC, Advocate Aurora, Duke fighting lawsuits over use of Meta’s tracking tool, STAT
New help for a group at risk for suicide: middle-aged men, Wall Street Journal
Former surgeon general faces his wife’s cancer — and the ‘Trump Effect,’ Washington Post