Infectious Disease
Three dairy farms in California undergoing testing for H5N1
California, the nation's largest milk producer, is investigating three herds for possible H5N1 outbreaks. If confirmed, these would be the first confirmed cases in the state.
Herds in California are less at risk for the infection spread than in some other states, STAT's Megan Molteni tells us, but many have feared that sooner or later, H5N1 would come to California.
"It seemed like it might be only a matter of time," said Terry Lehenbauer, a bovine disease epidemiologist and director of the Veterinary Medicine Teaching and Research Center at the University of California, Davis.
Politics
What RFK as Trump public health adviser would look like
Former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is angling for a place in a potential new Trump administration, pitching himself as a public health guy.
Even though he's linked a rise in chronic disease, particularly among children, to vaccines, he's recently tried to distance himself from those statements. He told House lawmakers during a hearing last September he has "never been anti-vax."
RFK's remarks and campaign materials indicate that he has plans for the FDA, including overhauling the user fee structure and requiring more safety studies on vaccines. He would change the NIH's focus from infectious disease to chronic disease prevention, including "toxic chemicals (PFAS, glyphosate, neonics, etc.), air and water pollution, microplastics, electromagnetic pollution, ultra-processed foods, and pharmaceutical products." He would pursue legal action against scientific journals for "publishing fake science to promote the mercantile ambitions" of various industries, including food and pharma.
STAT's Isabella Cueto and Sarah Owermohle have an analysis of RFK's positions and a fact-check from health experts evaluating his claims. Read more.
Health
Obesity drug also cut risk of dying from Covid
Last year, the hotly anticipated Select trial from Novo Nordisk showed that the obesity drug Wegovy had cardiovascular benefits beyond just weight loss — reducing the overall rate of major heart problems like heart attacks, stroke, or cardiovascular-related death by 20%.
The Select trial ran for five years, and the Covid-19 pandemic started in the middle of it. Knowing that the patients in the Select trial — who were overweight or had obesity and had heart disease — were more vulnerable to severe Covid, researchers started tracking Covid-related outcomes too.
"We realized that this was an unprecedented health event, and realized that we had the opportunity to potentially contribute to science," study author Benjamin Scirica told STAT.
At the European Society of Cardiology's annual meeting in London, researchers unveiled analysis showing that Wegovy cut the chances of dying from Covid-19 by roughly a third. Though patients contracted Covid at the same rate as placebo participants, 65 patients on placebo died from Covid, compared to 43 of those on the study drug.
Read more from STAT's Andrew Joseph.
Climate
Carbon emissions per puff: A closer look at inhalers
While one might think of overly air-conditioned hospitals and single-use medical supply waste as a bigger driver of health care carbon emissions, researchers are looking at how asthma and COPD inhalers can be greener.
The most common types of inhalers, the classic "metered-dose" ones, use propellant gases to aerosolize medicine that patients inhale. But those gases — which switched over from ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons in the 2000s to the current hydrofluorocarbons — are greenhouse gases more powerful than carbon dioxide and contribute heavily to climate change.
In a new JAMA research letter, Stanford allergist and immunologist Jyothi Tirumalasetty and colleagues looked at how much Medicare and Medicaid were paying for inhalers in 2022 — and how many carbon equivalents they emitted.
Read my Q&A with Tirumalasetty for what Midwestern city's electricity consumption is similar to the emissions from inhalers, and what pharmacy benefit manager formularies have to do with carbon emissions.
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