Syrian hospitals attacked, a microbiome boom, & blood donation safety

Health officials grapple with hurricane, earthquake

Health providers in Mexico City are caring for hundreds of people injured in the massive earthquake that hit the city Tuesday. At least 225 people were killed in the magnitude 7.1 quake. Mexico President Enrique Peña Nieto has said he’s ordered hospitals damaged by the earthquake to evacuate and transfer their patients to other health care facilities. Meanwhile, in the Caribbean, health officials are confronting the health impact of Hurricane Maria. All of Puerto Rico was left without power yesterday in the wake of the massive storm, forcing health facilities to run on backup generators. The main hospital on the island of Dominica also took a significant hit, making it difficult for doctors to take care of current and new patients.

Much of the public doesn't actively seek science news

Give yourselves a pat on the back, newsletter readers — a new Pew Research Center study finds just 17 percent of the public are “active science news consumers,” meaning they seek out science news and read it several times a week. And at a time where science finds itself increasingly at the center of public debate, both Republicans and Democrats are equally likely to be active science news consumers. More than 40 percent of people said they thought scientific findings are reported too quickly when they might not hold up. The study also nailed down some of the most common hurdles to understanding science news: lacking scientific knowledge, jumping to conclusions about what findings mean, and being inundated with too many studies to parse what’s important.

Inside STAT: He studied trauma victims. Then he became one

Dr. Dennis Charney in his office at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. (CHANTAL HEIJNEN FOR STAt)

Dr. Dennis Charney built his career studying depression, anxiety, and later, post-traumatic stress disorder. But that research didn’t prepare Charney — dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai — for some of the realities that came with becoming a trauma victim himself. In August 2016, Charney was shot by a researcher he’d fired, the bullet ripping through his right shoulder and puncturing a lung. He lost half his blood. Charney hoped he had the resiliency he’d researched and written about for years, and began mapping out his physical recovery almost immediately. Testifying at his shooter’s hearing last month, Charney made it clear that he accepted he'd joined the ranks of the trauma victims he’d studied. STAT’s Drew Joseph has more in a special report — read here.

Is it time to see a fall in falls?

Falls in older adults are a significant challenge in an aging society. Otsuka recently supported a pitch competition at the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics meeting, where a panel of judges selected a winning proposal: an accurate and reliable test to enhance screening services to identify older adults at risk of falls and measure the impact and benefit of rehab and therapy. Learn more directly from the CEO of pitch winner Kinesis Healthcare Technologies.

Lab Chat: Multiplying our microbiome knowledge

Scientists have discovered millions of previously undiscovered genes in the human microbiome in the largest human microbiome study ever carried out. Here’s what Jason Lloyd-Price of Harvard and the Broad Institute told me about the work, published in Nature.

What does your new research do?

We’re introducing a new, large microbiome data set. Using this data set, we then tried to characterize the personalization of the microbiome, looking in particular at strains of microbes. The strains that you carry may be very different from the strains that I carry. One of the more interesting results we found, because we had a large number of mouth samples, was that different species had unique subspecies in different parts of your mouth, such as a different subspecies in your tongue as opposed to your cheek. You might expect them to do the same thing because they’re the same species, but now we know that might not be the case.

What’s the next step in your research?

For future microbiome research, one of the things we are gonna want to do is zoom in like we’ve done here to try and really get at the fine-grain details of the microbiome and to observe it in many different contexts and areas of the body so that we can understand what makes each person’s microbiome unique.

Syrian health facilities hit in series of attacks

There’s been a string of attacks on health care facilities in Syria this week. Three hospitals were attacked and forced to shut their doors. Those attacks killed two paramedics, two hospital custodians, and wounded several others. There was another strike on a primary care facility, and three separate attacks targeting ambulances, which killed two paramedics who were caring for wounded patients. The WHO issued a statement condemning the nearly 100 attacks on hospitals and health workers in the country so far this year.

Donating blood every 8 weeks is OK, study finds

There aren’t any major side effects to giving blood more often than some countries currently allow, according to new results from a randomized trial published in the Lancet. In the U.S., people can donate every eight weeks. But in the U.K., men have to wait 12 weeks between donations, and women have to wait 16 weeks. The new study analyzed more than 45,000 blood donors who were split into groups and gave blood at different intervals over two years. There weren’t any significant differences in side effects between those groups. The researchers concluded that narrowing the donation interval to eight weeks is safe and could help to increase the blood supply. That’s much needed — with an aging population, the researchers argue, the need for blood is expected to rise.