The man behind the curtain & some necessary fact-checks

Plus: Microplastics are getting into our brains

February 4, 2025 Check out STAT+

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By Theresa Gaffney Morning Rounds Writer and Podcast Producer

Good morning! Did you know it's National Homemade Soup Day? I'm celebrating with a minestrone. It's also, apparently, National Stuffed Mushroom Day, National Thank A Mail Carrier Day, National Sweater Day, National Wicker Day, and a ton of other Days. Who comes up with these?

politics He ruled the operating room, then daytime TV. How would he rule health care? Screenshot/DrOz via Youtube For over a dozen years, Mehmet Oz hosted his popular — perhaps now infamous — talk show, promoting wellness products, ticking off countless doctors and scientists, triggering lawsuits and government warnings, and turning vaccine skeptics like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. into a household name. It was 2016 when he first publicly aligned himself with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.  Nine years later, Oz is poised to become administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. But does his background as a successful surgeon and even more successful television host give him the needed expertise to manage a large, complicated bureaucracy with thousands of employees? When STAT's Tara Bannow spoke to former colleagues — both doctors and TV producers — they were unanimously supportive of the appointment. But some experts have concerns about his financial conflicts in particular.  Read more about Oz in Tara's great and powerful profile. science Microplastics are getting into our brains Microplastics (and their even tinier counterparts, nanoplastics) are becoming omnipresent in our environments, as are the growing concerns about their potential health effects. A study of liver, kidney, and brain samples from people who died in either 2016 or 2024 found that the brain tissue contained higher proportions of the plastics than other organs. Time also made a big difference, as brain and liver tissue from those who died last year had significantly higher concentrations of the microplastics than the 2016 samples. The study — which included 20-28 samples for each organ in each year — also found that there was a higher concentration of plastic particles in 12 brains from people with dementia diagnoses. But this is just a correlation — more information is needed to better understand the potential health effects these plastics may have, the authors write. Scientists are just beginning to understand certain associations. Last year, a study linked microplastics in blood vessels to a greater risk of heart problems.  misinformation FACT CHECK: Vaccines & autism, Bernie & pharma If you're reading this newsletter, you likely already understand that questions about vaccines and autism have long been settled science — there's no correlation. But it may be harder to provide any sort of detailed explanation of said science. In a new essay, STAT's Matt Herper breaks it down.  It starts with understanding that there isn't just one argument that vaccines cause autism, there are three — at least. One focuses on toxins, another on the immune response, and the third on the cumulative effect of an increasing number of vaccines. Scientists have responded to each of these arguments with numerous studies examining all possible mechanisms and associations.  And in another needed fact-check, STAT's Lev Facher and Rachel Cohrs Zhang clarify that, no, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren aren't top recipients of pharma industry donations. That talking point swept across social media last week, but it's based on a misunderstanding of data from the popular money-in-politics website OpenSecrets. The site doesn't differentiate between corporate PAC spending and individual donations by employees at the same company.  Read more of the news you can use at the dinner table tonight — from Matt, Lev and Rachel.

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one big number 5,360 For every single day of extreme heat, that's the number of additional hospitalizations that could occur for people with Alzheimer's or related dementias nationwide, according to a study in JAMA Internal Medicine. Researchers analyzed Medicare claims from 2000 to 2018 with county-level climate data. They also found that Asian, Black, and Hispanic dementia patients had higher odds than white patients of being hospitalized due to four days of continuous extreme heat. "Climate change and population aging are progressing concurrently," different researchers write in an accompanying opinion essay in the same journal. Older adults are especially vulnerable when it comes to climate hazards, so clinicians, health systems, and policymakers need to "play leading roles in better safeguarding their health and well-being," they write. global health A new Ebola Sudan vaccine trial is underway In more vaccine news: A clinical trial designed to test whether an experimental Ebola Sudan vaccine actually works got underway in Uganda on Monday, with the WHO helping the Ugandan government to design and operate the study. The vaccine, made using the same platform as Merck's Ebola Zaire vaccine, Ervebo, is being developed by the nonprofit group IAVI. Running clinical trials of vaccines and therapeutics for rare diseases like Ebola Sudan is incredibly challenging. Years sometimes elapse between outbreaks, which can occur across several different countries. Having doses of vaccine available to test and a country willing to run a trial is not a given. And sometimes approvals come too slowly. An effort to test several Ebola Sudan vaccines in Uganda in 2022 was abandoned because the outbreak was contained before the trial could be done. This time, years of planning to persuade countries to conduct these trials is paying off. The trial began three days after the outbreak was first announced. Contacts of the man who died from the disease, and their contacts will be vaccinated in what's called a ring vaccination trial. Contacts are being randomly assigned to get immediate vaccination, or after a delay. Comparing the two groups could show if the vaccine cuts the risk of infection. — Helen Branswell

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What we're reading The long quest for artificial blood, New Yorker N.Y. Attorney General warns hospitals against canceling transgender care, New York Times NIH must address the twin crises of long Covid and ME/CFS — together, STAT Across the south, rural health care has become 'trendy.' Medicaid expansion has not, KFF Health News Removal of DEI content from a microbiology group's website shows reach of Trump executive orders, STAT

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Thanks for reading! More tomorrow,

theresa.gaffney@statnews.com

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