| | | |   By Elizabeth Cooney | Good morning. Wondering about SARS-CoV-2 variants? Helen Branswell's got us covered. | | | Do we need to keep up with Omicron’s offspring?  (Adobe) Every few months, we’re warned that the Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has spawned yet another subvariant, this one even more transmissible than the ones it’s fast overtaking. And like clockwork, people who are still following Covid-19 news worry. People who are determined to ignore Covid pay no attention. “This keeps happening every couple of months. I sort of feel like it's Groundhog Day, except with ‘scariants,’” coronavirus virologist Angela Rasmussen told STAT’s Helen Branswell, using a term coined by Eric Topol.
Topol and others think we should still be talking about subvariants — in order to increase uptake of boosters. And when a new one comes along, the advice doesn’t change: Stay up to date on vaccinations; get boosters when advised; consider wearing a high-quality mask in public settings; try to avoid being infected. But experts disagree on the discourse — and whether the media is at fault. Read more. | After mild infections, most long Covid symptoms clear after a year, large study says So how long does long Covid last? That’s the question researchers from Israel wanted to answer as they combed through nearly 2 million health records to compare symptoms of people who test positive to people who tested negative. They looked only at mild Covid-19 infections, which make up the vast majority of cases and whose outcomes are uncomplicated by the rigors of ICU treatment on a ventilator, for example.
Writing in BMJ, the researchers report that after a year, most people’s symptoms had subsided, with vaccination offering protection against shortness of breath — the most common problem, along with weakness — among the 70 long Covid conditions they studied. A caveat: A clinical epidemiologist not involved in the study told me comparing test-positive to test-negative people might paint a picture “too rosy to be true” if people were getting tests before chemo or surgery, but other experts found the results encouraging. Read more. | Uganda declares an end to Ebola outbreak Uganda’s latest Ebola outbreak is over, the government declared after registering no new cases for 42 days. The country recorded 142 confirmed cases, including 55 deaths, since September, the WHO said yesterday. This outbreak came from the less common Sudan strain of the Ebola virus, unlike the Zaire strain found in nearby Congo in recent years. “With no vaccines and therapeutics, this was one of the most challenging Ebola outbreaks in the past five years,” Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa, said.
Swati Gupta, who worked at Merck during an Ebola outbreak in West Africa, asks what’s next in a STAT First Opinion: “The question now is whether the global public health community will revert to its pattern of reacting to an emergency situation, coming together to fight the outbreak with enormous effort and genuine intent, and then reprioritizing efforts to other diseases as the outbreak subsides and funding shifts.” Read more. | Improve quality while controlling costs With improved data and analytics, healthcare systems are boosting patient outcomes while simultaneously delivering quality care at a lower cost. Uncover your value with cost-reduction technology, service line analytics and clinically integrated margin improvement consulting. Learn more. | Closer look: Medical schools need to catch up to AI, students and educators say Health care is being transformed by artificial intelligence, but medical schools have only just begun to teach about AI and and machine learning — creating knowledge gaps that could compound the damage caused by flawed algorithms and biased decision-support systems. “We’re going to be at a point where we’re not going to be able to catch up and be able to call out the technology defects or flaws,” Erkin Ötleş, a machine learning researcher working towards his medical degree and Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, told STAT’s Katie Palmer.
In a recent commentary published in Cell Reports Medicine, Ötleş and others called for medical schools to make AI less of an afterthought. “Medical students don’t know about this stuff, and they need to see it as basic as pharmacology and physiology,” co-author and former Michigan medical school dean Jim Woolliscroft told Katie.
Read the full interview here. | HHS wants to hear from us on Medicare drug pricing The hottest topic in drug pricing is how HHS will use its new power to negotiate prices for Medicare, thanks to last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. As expected, the pharmaceutical industry will be closely watching the rollout for any opportunity to file lawsuits challenging either the process or the substance of the negotiation program. But the public will also have more of a chance to weigh in along the way than initially expected, officials said yesterday. Some of the topics: - The approach for considering data and evidence
- The process for drugmakers to make counteroffers
- How HHS should explain its decisions on final prices
- Developing a dispute resolution process
- Imposing penalties on drugmakers who don’t go along with what Medicare decides
STAT’s Rachel Cohrs has more. | CDC: Tap water is not sterile, folks No, no, and no. That’s the message from CDC to people using unsterile water in home medical devices. If you think you don’t have any, do you wear (and rinse) contact lenses? Fill a humidifier? Use a nasal rinse or CPAP device? Tap water isn’t sterile, so it can lead to infections — some deadly — from such nasty waterborne microbes as Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Legionella, nontuberculous mycobacteria, and Naegleria fowleri.;
The warning follows a survey: - What people think: 33% believe tap water doesn’t harbor bugs; 62% said it’s fine for rinsing sinuses, 50% for rinsing contacts, and 42% for use in respiratory devices.
- What people did: 24% filled humidifiers or CPAP machines with tap water, 13% used it for nasal rinsing, and 9% for rinsing contact lenses.
Tap water is safe for drinking and cooking, and for medical devices, distilled water or water that has been properly boiled and cooled is better. | | | | | What we're reading - Top Verily executives depart amid leadership shakeup and layoffs, STAT
- Coronavirus ‘chimera’ made in lab shows what makes Omicron seemingly less deadly, Washington Post
- Medicare paves the way for CAR-T in doctors offices, STAT
- R.J. Reynolds pivots to new cigarette pitches as flavor ban takes effect, New York Times
- Upstart Element ratchets up race for cheaper DNA sequencing with a $200 genome, STAT
| Thanks for reading! More tomorrow,  | | | | Have a news tip or comment? Email Me | | | | | | | | Kendall Square February 9 | | | | | | | |
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