| | | |   By Elizabeth Cooney | Good morning. Andrew Joseph takes a closer look at the "Fauci effect" on applications to infectious disease fellowships. | | | Patients with obesity scramble to get drug now limited to treating type 2 diabetes Celebrity wellness tips, med spa marketing, and TikTok fervor have combined to make new drugs to treat diabetes and obesity increasingly hard to find. Drugmaker Eli Lilly now restricts access to tirzepatide, sold as Mounjaro, to people with type 2 diabetes, leaving people with obesity few options for treatment.
Three other GLP-1 receptor agonists, which help people feel full, have also been in short supply: Novo Nordisk’s obesity drug Wegovy and diabetes drug Ozempic, along with Eli Lilly’s diabetes medication Trulicity. And Lilly limits its drug coupon program to people with diabetes, so what used to cost $25 a month now hits about $1,000 for others. “Obesity can lead to diabetes, diabetes can lead to obesity,” Beverly Tchang of Weill Cornell Medicine told STAT’s Elaine Chen. “To treat one but not the other seems inequitable.” Read more. | Apple notches a victory in dispute over heart-monitoring technologies That was fast: Yesterday morning we told you about Apple’s high-profile dispute with medical device company AliveCor. Later yesterday, Apple scored a win. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board has ruled that three AliveCor patents covering heart-monitoring technologies for wearable devices were unpatentable. AliveCor had alleged in federal court and before the International Trade Commission that Apple copied the technologies with its Apple Watch, and over the summer an ITC judge found that Apple had infringed on two of three patents asserted in its complaint.
The fight is not over. Yesterday’s decision could disrupt the proceedings at the ITC, which is set to decide by Monday whether there ought to be an exclusion order, or ban, on infringing Apple Watches. It’s likely that Apple will swiftly submit the PTAB rulings to the ITC for consideration in its decision. STAT’s Mario Aguilar has the latest. | U.K. reports surge in scarlet fever in kids STAT's Helen Branswell brings us this report: Six children in the U.K. have died recently of bacterial infections caused by invasive group A Streptococcus. Public health authorities have also reported a strong surge in cases of highly contagious scarlet fever among children, with more than four times the number of infections than is normally reported at this point in the year. Scarlet fever is one of the manifestations of group A Strep infection; others include strep throat, impetigo, rheumatic fever, streptococcal toxic shock syndrome, and necrotizing fasciitis, or flesh-eating disease.
To date, the CDC says it has not observed an increase in scarlet fever cases, though it notes the condition is not a notifiable disease in the U.S. “However, we follow infectious disease listservs and stay in close contact with state and local health departments. Neither have suggested that cases of scarlet fever are increasing among children in the United States,” an agency spokesperson told STAT. | Pursuing a better future for people living with hematologic disorders Hematologic disorders, including non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas and others, significantly impact the lives of millions of Americans. Innovative immunotherapies and other novel medicines have the potential to offer hope to these individuals for a longer life and reduce burdens at various stages of their treatment journey.
Scientists at Genentech are pursuing therapeutic innovations to improve outcomes for people with hematologic disorders and rethinking what is possible when it comes to standards of care and the patient experience. Learn more about how research has made important strides in treating various types of blood diseases. | Closer look: Infectious disease applicants plummet  (eric gay/ap) Way back when the pandemic was new, applications soared for infectious disease fellowships — specialized training that follows the residencies medical students enter upon graduation. That spike in interest matched a trend experienced in other public health-related fields, one that was dubbed the “Fauci effect.” But now fully a quarter of available ID positions have gone unfilled. Among fellowship programs, 44% didn’t fill their slots, according to data from the National Resident Matching Program.
“Being at the forefront of the pandemic, and being underappreciated, might be the killer combination,” Joseph Sassine of the University of Oklahoma told STAT’s Andrew Joseph. That begs the question of another Fauci effect, as in the death threats made against him and his family. The sentiment, along with lower salaries relative to other specialties, may come into play in biomedical hubs from Seattle to Boston. Read more. | Post-Covid conditions track with infection severity New diagnoses of post-Covid conditions, a term that includes long Covid and post-ICU syndrome, have been hard to categorize given changing definitions. A new study in the Journal of Internal Medicine based on records for roughly 200,000 patients in Sweden describes who is diagnosed with a new condition and who had one before. Diagnoses tracked with illness severity, but there were other factors: Females and those diagnosed with previous mental health disorders or asthma were more likely to have post Covid-19 conditions among non-hospitalized and hospitalized individuals.
Before acute infection, 53% of non-hospitalized, 48% of hospitalized, and 41% of ICU-treated individuals had one or more diagnoses that fit under the post-Covid condition umbrella, most often anxiety for non-hospitalized (16%) and hospitalized (12%) people and muscle pain (12%) for the ICU patients. The authors suggest “some of the disease burden could be wrongly attributed to Covid-19 or that Covid-19 accentuates pre-existing conditions.” | Twin births rebound after pandemic slump  Twin births in the U.S. from 2014 through 2021. (NCHS) Twin births began to climb in the U.S. in the early 1980s, but over the last decade they’ve been falling by about 3% per year — until the pandemic emerged. Twins and other multiple births occur more often when infertility treatments initiate pregnancy, so when the the American Society for Reproductive Medicine recommended a temporary pause in new infertility treatment cycles and the transfer of embryos, it appears to have had an effect, a new CDC report says.
Twin births fell by 7% from 2019 to 2020 — more than twice the 3% drop in singleton births — but bounced back up by 2% from 2020 to 2021. Twins are at higher risk for preterm birth and low birthweight, so the decline in twin births from 2019 to 2020 may have contributed to fewer preterm and low birthweight infants born in that timeframe. | | | | | What to read around the web today - Zantac lawsuits are tossed out as judge lambasts lack of evidence showing links to cancer, STAT
- Musk’s Neuralink faces federal probe, employee backlash over animal tests, Reuters
- Backed by tech giants and federal regulators, a new coalition aims to set the agenda for AI in health care, STAT
- Abandoned: The human cost of neurotechnology failure, Nature
- 'This is not a cure': Consensus begins to emerge on new Alzheimer’s drug, STAT
- JPMorgan is still trying to fix health care, Bloomberg
| Thanks for reading! More tomorrow,  P.S. Scientific papers don't typically come with warnings about language being offensive, but I guess that comes with the territory when the research asks if the sound of swearing is universal across languages. Spoiler alert: You're darn right it does, including "minced oaths" like the one I just used. | | | | Have a news tip or comment? Email Me | | | | | |
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