Closer Look
Former surgeon general Jerome Adams navigates a new path
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Jerome Adams has learned to pick his battles. The former surgeon general during the Trump years now weighs whether his response on social media to misinformation will elevate a harmful idea, so sometimes he chooses not to engage. He understands no one will outrun the shadow of the "Trump hangover" because that administration was so polarizing. But the worst attack he's weathered recently was personal: "I got more death threats and more hate mail about my wife's cancer than for any media piece I've done since I left office as surgeon general," he told STAT's Usha Lee McFarling.
Asked what it's like to be an extremely successful Black male physician in anesthesiology, where just about 5% of physicians are Black, he acknowledged that doctors are mistaken for valets. "What is really concerning to me is the research that is now coming out that shows the physiological impact of these daily micro-aggressions." Read the full interview here.
health
Sweeping overhaul ahead for organ transplant system
For 37 years, the U.S. organ transplant system has been run by a nonprofit organization long criticized as inadequate to the challenge of arranging donations and allocating organs fairly and quickly. Now the federal government is stepping in with a sweeping overhaul that would transform the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, now managed by the United Network for Organ Sharing, by breaking up its functions.
The problems are pressing: Too many organs are discarded, damaged in transit, or not collected, the Washington Post reports; outdated technology jeopardizes transplants; and poor performers face little accountability. The federal Health Resources & Services Administration proposes data dashboards by transplant center and organ procurement organization for accountability, major IT updates, and competitive contracts to manage the network. Meanwhile, nearly 104,000 people are on waiting lists for organs; 22 people die each day awaiting transplants, and low-income individuals and people of color generally fare the worst.
pandemic
Cases of post-Covid inflammation in kids are falling
Just as the coronavirus pandemic is not over yet, it's also too soon to say a rare complication in children following Covid has ended either. But a new research letter in NEJM says with each new variant of SARS-CoV-2, the severity of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children has dropped. Data from an international registry of just over 2,000 cases showed that kids with MIS-C during the Delta and Omicron periods were younger and symptoms such as respiratory dysfunction and coronary-artery dilatation were less frequent than during the original and Alpha waves.
Treatments improved over that time span, including more use of steroids for inflammation. At the same time, the risks of serious complications (heart rhythm disorders, cardiac arrest, kidney complications, and blood clotting problems) fell, as did ICU admissions and deaths, with the biggest drop during Omicron. But MIS-C didn't disappear: 23% of patients during Omicron experienced shock and 37% were admitted to an ICU.
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