Closer Look
Not there yet: The finish line for polio eradication is still ahead
The dream of stamping out polio forever is still out of reach, despite hopes that a new oral vaccine would be a game-changer. Known as nOPV2 and in use for two years, it's much less likely than earlier oral vaccines to acquire the capacity to, on rare occasions, paralyze children. The new vaccine, much safer than the oral polio vaccine it replaced, faces a different challenge: Not enough children are being vaccinated.
"Eradication, it was never about the vaccines. It's all about coverage — getting the vaccine into the mouths of children," Roland Sutter, a consultant who has worked for decades on polio eradication, told STAT's Helen Branswell. Yet there are many more factors complicating eradication. Read more.
cost-effectiveness
New analysis calls gene therapy for sickle cell disease an 'equitable therapeutic strategy'
How do you calculate the cost-effectiveness of a potentially curative gene therapy for a debilitating disease affecting people who likely live with systemic health inequities? Researchers writing in the Annals of Internal Medicine apply "distributional cost-effectiveness analysis" to sickle cell disease, an inherited blood disorder that strikes 1 of every 365 Black people in the U.S., many of whom experience bias and disbelief when they seek care.
The nonprofit ICER previously determined that if priced at $1.9 million, the not-yet-approved treatments would be cost-effective compared with a lifetime of chronic and acute care, STAT's Ed Silverman has reported. The new study says by conventional metrics, gene therapy would not be cost-effective at $2.8 million vs. $1.2 million for standard care, but it could be a valuable approach — and reduce health disparities — when equity, cost, and value of treatment are weighed together.
health
Opinion: It's time to test and treat young people for 'bad' cholesterol
It's not every 27-year-old who asks his doctor for a cholesterol test as he's leaving a checkup. But First Opinion author Suhas Gondi did. He's also a physician and, as a South Asian man, at higher risk than white men of having a heart attack at an early age. But cholesterol screening guidelines don't recommend testing until age 35, and risk calculators to make sense of the results cover only ages 40 through 75.
That gap is troubling, Gondi says, because more than half of young adults in the U.S. have "bad" LDL levels high enough to increase lifetime cardiovascular risk, but only about 40% have had their cholesterol checked in the last five years. Few are prescribed statins to control it. "Under-checking is compounded by under-treating," he writes. "Our health care system is shortchanging young people like me and putting us at higher risk of preventable heart disease later in life." Read more.
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