photojournalism
STAT's best photos of 2023
Caroline Yang for STAT
I don't know how they narrowed down their list to just 14. Alissa Ambrose, STAT's director of photography and multimedia, worked with Crystal Milner, STAT's picture editor, to choose the most memorable photos of 2023 from STAT's many contributing photographers. The one above shows Bat-Erdene Namsrai performing an experiment on a rat for new research on cryogenic organ preservation, described in this story by contributor Marion Renault.
You'll find more images here of people whose stories we told, among them investors and researchers moving their industries forward, a man working to escape the cycle of addiction, and physician who has taken his career on the road after the abortions he provides were made illegal in his home state.
pandemic
Lessons on the power of contract tracing
Remember contract tracing for Covid-19? A new study in Nature looking at 7 million contacts in England and Wales notified by the NHS COVID-19 app concludes that how much time someone spent with an infected person was the single biggest predictor of whether they would become infected with Covid-19 themselves. The authors say their analysis also shows the power of contact-tracing apps like this one to deliver precise information on risk in future epidemics.
Here's how it worked: The app relied on Bluetooth signal strength to measure how close and how long smartphones were nearby, and then notified the contacts of confirmed cases. The researchers combined that data with 240,000 positive tests reported after notification. Duration and proximity mattered: Fleeting contacts (less than 30 minutes) made up half of reported contacts but very few transmissions. Household contacts were just 6% of contacts, but they accounted for 40% of transmissions.
opinion
Health care cost increases aren't exceeding inflation for one good reason
Yesterday we told you the U.S. government spent more on health care in 2022 than six countries with universal health care, combined. Today, oncologost Ezekiel Emanuel notes that while health care spending in the U.S. has historically exceeded overall inflation, that's changed in recent years.
With the exception of 2020's Covid spike, health care costs have remained at or below 18% of GDP since 2010, when Obamacare began. Medicare's spending per person has been flat for more than a decade, and premiums for private employer-sponsored insurance have been increasing at 3.7% in the past decade, much slower than the 8.4% between 1999 and 2011. Why? "The mindset of American physicians and other clinicians has changed, from ignoring costs to trying to cut them," Emanuel writes in a STAT First Opinion. Read his explanation.
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