STAT’s lingering questions about bird flu transmission

Do cows spread bird flu the way people spread the flu?

April 30, 2024 Check out STAT+

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By Theresa Gaffney Morning Rounds Writer and Podcast Producer

I saw the movie "Challengers" last night, and it was much funnier than I thought it was going to be? Loved it. While I was at the cinema, some of my coworkers were making news in D.C. at STAT's Policy in Health Care event. Read more about it below.

h5n1 bird flu How does a cow get bird flu, anyway? CHRISTINE KAO/STAT It's been just over a month since the U.S. Department of Agriculture made the startling announcement that dairy cows had been infected with H5N1 bird flu, an insidious virus that up until recently hadn't been thought to be a bovine threat. Scientists have been racing to try to figure out how long the virus has been spreading in cows, how far it has spread, and whether it can be stopped. Key to that last question is discerning how H5N1 is transmitting among cows in the first place. Some answers are coming into focus. It seems abundantly clear at this point that once bird flu viruses found their way into a herd, the techniques involved in milking and herd management effectively spread the virus cow to cow and herd to herd. How widespread the problem is remains uncertain. How likely it is that spread can be stopped is also unclear, STAT's Megan Molteni and Helen Branswell report. Read more to learn about bird flu's known unknowns.   medical devices Defective breathing machines lead to $1.1 billion in settlement payments Medical device maker Philips said yesterday it will pay more than a billion dollars to settle hundreds of personal injury lawsuits in the U.S. over its defective sleep apnea machines, which have been subject to a massive global recall. The Dutch manufacturer has recalled more than 5 million breathing machines since 2021 because their internal foam can break down, leading users to inhale tiny particles and fumes while they sleep.  Philips' saga has exposed major challenges in medical device regulation and patient safety monitoring. Its payout also includes medical monitoring claims from patients who used the company's devices and could experience future complications. Read more on one of the biggest medical device recalls in the industry's history, and how the news affected the company's stock price. mental health Can exercise during youth prevent mental health problems? Research has shown that exercise has a broad anti-depressant effect, but a study published yesterday in JAMA Pediatrics brings scientists closer to proving that exercise has preventative power when it comes to mental health disorders like anxiety, depression, and ADHD in children.  Using two national databases in Taiwan — one with health care information and another with physical fitness assessments — researchers analyzed records for 2 million middle-school aged students between 2009 to 2019. They found that increased fitness was associated with lower risks of certain mental health disorders, particularly when it came to activities like running and strength exercises. "The study unquestionably moves the field forward in a significant way," Nick Allen, a psychology professor and researcher focused on adolescent mental health at the University of Oregon, wrote in an email to STAT. Allen was not involved in the study, but found its large sample and longitudinal design impressive. Still, he said that an intervention-based study that follows youth in real time is needed to prove a direct causal relationship between fitness and mental health for young people.

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first opinion Pregnant people need to be included in clinical research ADOBE Imagine having to make this decision: Your health care provider recommends that you take a specific medicine, but then tells you it hasn't been tested in people like you. Do you take it or refuse? For the 3.5 million people who give birth each year in the U.S, this is the dilemma they face when considering almost any medication. Pregnant people experience the same diseases as everyone else, but are still regularly excluded from clinical trials because of concerns about exposing both them and fetuses to untested treatments. But "excluding pregnant people from research fails to prevent harm to them and their offspring — and actually increases it," write health policy and ethics experts Alexander Capron and Anna Mastroianni in a new First Opinion essay. The exclusion simply forces pregnant people to take on the risks themselves, in the real world. Read more on what the authors say the Food and Drug Administration can do to make sure pregnant people are safely included in research.  stat events Health official outlines Biden cybersecurity plan at STAT D.C. event The Biden administration's plan to improve cybersecurity at hospitals starts off with incentives, but eventually hospitals will face penalties for not adopting measures to protect patient data, HHS Deputy Secretary Andrea Palm said Monday at STAT's event. The comment comes more than two months after a cyberattack against Change Healthcare, a UnitedHealth group subsidiary that operates the largest medical claims clearinghouse in the country, left many doctors unable to get paid by Medicare.  HHS already published a cybersecurity plan in December, but the Change breach turbocharged the issue. Read more from STAT's John Wilkerson on the Biden administration's approach and its Obama-era policy inspiration. And for further event coverage, read more from STAT's Katherine MacPhail about the difficulties of accessing methadone. One speaker, Indiana Recovery Alliance's Nicholas Voyles, had to miss his daily dose while traveling due to a "paperwork misplacement," he said. "I've been taking methadone for a long time. But if I was a year in or something, this would be withdrawal — acute withdrawal."

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Thanks for reading! More tomorrow,

theresa.gaffney@statnews.com

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