science
The lasting impacts of the Trump funding freeze
It can be hard to comprehend the news when it's coming at you this fast. But news always has consequences. In the latest from STAT's Eric Boodman, we meet Nancy Hastings, an 86-year-old from West Virginia. For Hastings, "the face of the federal government is the young man who picks her up every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 5:45 a.m. to drive her to dialysis," Eric writes. In late January, after the funding freeze, that young man was laid off when the nonprofit he works for didn't have the money to keep paying everyone.
The freeze was framed by Trump as targeting "big bureaucracy" and its "fraud and waste and abuse." But the truth is more complicated than that. Part of what government staffers do is distribute federal dollars, often to programs that people depend on across the country. Read more from Eric about how patients and caregivers far from D.C. have been affected by the administration's big moves.
first opinion
Her sister died at the NIH, but she's still grateful to them
Ariel Reinish grew up on the NIH campus, in a way. Her sister Shelby was 10 when she was diagnosed with von Hippel-Lindau disease — a rare genetic disorder caused by a mutation in the VHL gene that can lead to tumors in the brain, eyes, spine, and more.
Ariel would often go with Shelby and their mom to the clinical center at the NIH. "The waiting rooms always had an unexpected sense of home," Reinish writes in a new First Opinion essay. But after her second brain surgery, Shelby had a stroke and died.
"The worst thing in my life happened at the NIH," Reinish writes of her sister's death 10 years ago. "Despite that, the NIH gave my family hope and continues to do so." Read more in this beautiful essay about how the political discourse around science and research is failing to capture one sister's lived experience.
research
Could SSRIs protect against infections? A mouse study has hints
Recent research has indicated that people who had Covid-19 while on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (antidepressants like Prozac) had less severe infections and were less likely to develop long Covid. To understand how interactions between SSRIs and other infectious diseases might work, researchers in a new study observed mice with bacterial infections, half while on fluoxetine (Prozac) and half not.
Eight hours after infection, the Prozac group had fewer bacteria inside them, indicating that the drug has antimicrobial properties, the authors write in Science Advances. There was also more of a specific anti-inflammatory protein in that group, which helped to prevent sepsis. The results were in mice, of course, and many more studies are needed. But it's an interesting potential avenue of research for a drug that many Americans already take.
And for more context: The study published one day after one of President Trump's latest executive orders establishing a "Make America Healthy Again Commission," which, among many other directives, will "assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs."
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