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Thursday, May 18, 2017
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Happy Thursday, everyone! Welcome to Morning Rounds, where I get you ahead of the day's health news.
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New budget may cut mental health money for schools
President Trump's proposed new education budget for 2018 would cut all funding for a student support program that's designed to help K-12 schools pay for mental health services for students, according
to documents obtained by the
Washington Post. Lawmakers had previously given the green light for as much as $1.65 billion in funding for support and enrichment grants, which also help pay for anti-bullying programs, physical education classes, and
other school initiatives. The Trump administration didn't budget any money for the fund in its proposal.
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Pope Francis meets with rare disease community
Pope Francis is meeting today in Vatican City with members of the Huntington’s disease community, who are cheering the meeting as a historic symbol of new attention on a disease that's flown under the
radar for decades. The fatal genetic condition — which causes a progressive breakdown of the brain’s nerve cells — can’t be cured. It can leave people unable to walk, talk, or swallow at the end of life. The pope’s interest in the issue was sparked in part
by the prevalence of Huntington’s disease in South America, including his homeland of Argentina.
"I hope that Pope Francis’s gesture to the Huntington’s community can inspire those suffering from all diseases to strive for a world where care and cure trump stigma and, perhaps even worse, indifference," says Kenneth Serbin, an activist whose mother died
of Huntington's and who also carries the gene for the condition. The meeting is just getting underway — if you’re an early bird, you can tune in
here.
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A new look at how the AHCA could hit women's wallets
(amino)
With the future of the AHCA still up in the air, there's concern about what will happen if essential health benefits such as preventive care end up on the
chopping block. Obamacare required that insurers completely cover preventive care, including birth control, cancer screenings, and vaccines. But the AHCA would allow states to opt out of that mandate. In a new
report, Amino examines what it might mean for women's health care costs if that happens. Researchers culled data from more than 9 billion health insurance claims to determine how much women's health services cost out of
pocket nationwide. Here's what they found:
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IUD: $1,000.
Intrauterine devices offer long-lasting birth control and need to be replaced every three to 10 years, depending on the type.
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Mammogram: $250. The US Preventive Services Task Force
recommends women between 50 and 74 get a mammogram every other year.
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Pap smear: $200.
It's
recommended that women between ages 21 and 65 get a Pap smear to screen for cervical cancer every three years. Women over 30 can stretch that to every five years if they get HPV testing done simultaneously.
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One dose of HPV vaccine: $300.
The HPV vaccine, which protects against cervical cancer, is given in a series of either two or three doses.
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Sponsor content by STAT Events
Come celebrate science with us!
Join us tonight for a live storytelling event at The Oberon theater in Cambridge, cohosted by STAT and The Story Collider. We'll present five real stories from real people celebrating the role science
plays in our lives.
Register now.
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Inside STAT: A radical view in the age of superbugs
Janelle Ayres argues for a radically new approach to treating infection. (Sandy huffaker for stat)
Janelle Ayres spent nine days at her father's bedside as he lay dying of sepsis. When he didn't beat the bloodstream infection, she grieved. And continued working on a better way to help patients like
her dad. Ayres, a physiologist, is intent on overhauling our most fundamental understanding of how the human body battles disease. Scientists have focused on the immune system for decades, but Ayres believes other elements of our physiology are critical to
fighting pathogens, too. Her approach: Instead of focusing on fighting infections, help the body find a way to tolerate them. STAT's Usha Lee McFarling has the story
here.
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Lab Chat: Creating stem cells that can produce blood
Scientists have created lab-grown blood stem cells that can actually pump out their own blood for the first time, a step toward understanding and testing new treatments for blood diseases. Here’s what
Dr. George Daley of Harvard and Boston Children’s Hospital tells me about the work, published in
Nature.
How did you create blood stem cells in the lab?
We start with a skin biopsy or maybe a blood sample from a patient. We reprogram those donor cells to convert them back to their embryonic state. We can use gene editing techniques to repair their gene
defect. Now we’ve got essentially the patient’s own stem cells but with the gene repaired. Then, we coaxed those induced pluripotent stem cells into blood stem cells.
What’s the goal of your research?
Our goal is to be able to make blood stem cells in a dish, so that we can take any patient and be able to offer them a healthy version of their own stem cells. When patients develop leukemia or are born
with genetic blood disease, the best chance to cure those patients is through a bone marrow transplant. The workhorse of a bone marrow transplant is the blood stem cell. There’s lots of opportunities to use this: For basic research to study disease, for translational
research to identify drugs and gene therapies, and ultimately, we want to engineer cells themselves that could be used to treat disease.
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Lead poisoning test results might be inaccurate
Federal health officials are out with a
new warning that some blood lead tests might be producing inaccurate results. The agency says four tests made by Magellan that use samples from a patient's blood draw might return results that are lower than their actual
blood lead levels. The faulty test results might stretch back as far as 2014, and officials say that children age six and under and pregnant and nursing women might need to be retested. Lead poisoning in young kids can cause problems with physical and mental
development.
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The high prevalence of heavy drinking in the US
A new
analysis out from the NIH suggests that binge drinking is still a big problem in the US. It's defined as consuming at least four drinks in one sitting for women and five drinks for men. Researchers combed two years of
epidemiological studies and found that 8 percent of women and 18 percent of men reported drinking at least twice as much as that threshold in the past year. That amounts to 32 million Americans. Even the lightest binge drinkers — those who reported having
between four and seven drinks in one sitting — were 13 times more likely to have an alcohol-related ER visit than people who didn’t binge drink at all.
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What to read around the web today
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When the lab rat is a snake.
New York Times Magazine
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This doctor’s plan to stop superbugs is widely used. At her own hospital, it didn’t work.
Los Angeles Times
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Ethics of aid: Should donated health dollars go to 'children first'?
NPR
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Thanks for reading! More tomorrow,
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