Closer Look
Opinion: To see if The Match limits diversity, data is needed on who doesn't win a residency spot
Dom Smith/STAT
In many ways, The Match is a black box. The algorithm-driven system places graduating medical students in residency programs, each year announcing decisions on the third Friday in March that follow medical school, application preparation, interviews, and recruitment. Like no other job search, it matches applicants who rate their residency program picks with institutions that rank candidates, using categories like "guaranteed match," "highly desired," "matchable range," "unlikely to match," and "do not rank."
Writing in a STAT First Opinion, three emergency medicine physicians from Harvard and Stanford — Onyekachi T. Otugo, Al'ai Alvarez, and Adaira I. Landry — spotlight those last two designations, noting that thousands of applicants go unmatched, despite the need for more doctors, especially from underrepresented groups. But while data on who has successfully matched are made public, who doesn't is confidential. "This process can create a smokescreen that allows potential factors, such as structural discrimination, to go unchecked," they write. Read more.
public health
CDC advises universal screening for hepatitis B
The same day that the Biden administration sought $11 billion from Congress to eliminate hepatitis C (see item above), the CDC updated its recommendations on screening for a related disease: hepatitis B. While a cure exists for hepatitis C in the form of a daily pill, there is no cure for hepatitis B, but proper treatment and monitoring can prevent related liver damage and liver cancer.
The guidelines now says all adults should be tested for hepatitis B at least once in their lifetimes; they also expand the list of people at risk who should be tested more frequently. That includes anyone who is or was incarcerated in a jail, prison, or other detention setting; anyone with a history of sexually transmitted infections or multiple sex partners; and anyone with a history of hepatitis C virus infection. In this first update to hepatitis B recommendations since 2008, the CDC notes that more than half of people with hepatitis B don't know they're infected.
health
FDA requires breast density notice for mammograms
The FDA issued new requirements yesterday that patients receive information about breast density along with their results, adopting a national policy that mirrors what some states already mandate. Breast density raises the odds of cancer in two ways: More fibrous or glandular tissue — the definition of density — compared with fatty tissue in the breast has been linked to a higher risk of invasive breast cancer. And because dense tissue looks white on a mammogram, as do growths in the breast, cancers in those images are harder to detect.
Patients whose scans reveal dense breasts will receive a written notice alerting them that their status "makes it harder to find breast cancer." They'll be advised to talk with their doctors about it, although the Associated Press notes professional guidelines don't say what to do next, which could include further tests using MRI or ultrasound. Read more.
by the numbers
A note to our readers
When President Biden said last fall the pandemic was "over," he was roundly accused of over-rosy optimism. As STAT's Helen Branswell reminded us then, there's no on-off switch for the pandemic. But here we are at a transition that's more black and white: The major providers of data on daily Covid-19 cases and deaths — which we rely on for our own charts — either aren't going to do it anymore or are switching to less frequent reporting. At their best, they've alway been snapshots, but Johns Hopkins is shutting down its tracker today, CDC will update its stats only weekly (which may be bumpier due to delays at its sources), and Our World in Data has switched over to WHO's weekly updates.
All this comes as few home testing results are reported to public health entities, adding a big asterisk to those case totals and making that snapshot blurrier. So we're suspending our daily Covid charts, too, not because the pandemic has disappeared but because the most reliable data have.
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