taste testing
Is MAHA-approved beef tallow better for you? And more importantly, does it taste better?
Alex Hogan/STAT
In his latest video, STAT's Alex Hogan sets out to answer these two burning questions. For the first, he consults our reporter on the commercial determinants of health, Sarah Todd. They talk about what nutrition expert Marion Nestle calls a "nutritionally hilarious" strategy by the Make America Healthy Again movement of targeting particular food ingredients. Hilarious because: If you replace the high-fructose corn syrup in Coca-Cola with cane sugar, it's still soda.
But what about taste? To answer the second question, Alex goes straight to the source. And by that, I mean that he goes to a local Buffalo Wild Wings, where both fries and wings are fried in beef tallow. Also taste-tested: a glass bottle of cane sugar Coke and fancy, no-artificial-dyes ice cream. Watch the video. It has immediately achieved iconic STAT video status in my mind, right alongside our first viral hit about how tilapia skin can be used to bandage burns.
biotech
A gene therapy crisis at Sarepta Therapeutics
Sarepta said this week that it will halt shipments of its gene therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy due to safety concerns. The treatment, called Elevidys, was approved last year for virtually all Duchenne patients, who suffer from genetic muscle weakness that often leads them to require a wheelchair by adolescence, and who rarely survive past age 30.
But this year, Elevidys has been tied to the deaths of two teenagers, leading the company to pause shipments of the drug for patients whose disease has progressed to the point where they cannot walk. Last week, a 51-year-old with a different form of muscular dystrophy died after receiving another Sarepta gene therapy, prompting the FDA to request the company stop all shipments of its Duchenne treatment. (Sarepta initially refused the request.)
My colleagues on STAT's biotech team have been covering the evolution of this promising treatment for years. In their latest, STAT's Adam Feuerstein and Jason Mast report that a senior FDA official says Sarepta faces an "arduous" path back to market for this treatment. "How do you show something is safe when it's already proven to be not safe?" the official said. Read the exclusive story and subscribe to The Readout to make sure you don't miss a single update.
first opinion
What happens to daily methadone treatment in a climate disaster?
This summer, we've seen devastating flooding move through Texas while slow-moving storms crawled up the East Coast, resulting in more flooding. Last year, Hurricane Helene washed out much of central North Carolina's roads and infrastructure, while the Palisades and Eaton wildfires in Southern California devastated entire communities. There's a growing recognition that it's important to have critical medications on hand for emergencies like these, but that's impossible for people who take methadone, as they are required to travel daily to specific clinics to receive the treatment.
Even on a sunny day, the logistics of this treatment can be a hassle. In a new First Opinion essay, three clinicians and researchers argue that in a climate disaster, this siloed, restricted treatment can turn that hassle into a deadly disruption of care. The reliance on opioid treatment programs as the exclusive dispensers of methadone in the U.S. is untenable, the authors write. Read more about how they believe the system could change.
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