Abortion access for immigrant teens in custody, making muscles, & homeopathy crackdown

Judge orders Trump administration to allow abortions for immigrant teens in custody

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to allow two pregnant immigrant teens in federal custody to obtain abortions — a decision which the administration swiftly appealed to both a federal appeals court and the Supreme Court. The judge is giving the administration 24 hours to convince a higher court to overturn the decision before the order goes into effect. The battle comes hot on the heels of a high-profile legal fight in October over a 17-year-old undocumented immigrant’s right to obtain an abortion while in federal custody. The Trump administration refused to transport her to the procedure. After several rounds of legal back-and-forth, the teen was allowed to obtain an abortion.

The FDA wants to crack down on homeopathic products

FDA officials are looking to take a tougher stance on homeopathic remedies that haven’t been proven to treat or cure disease. The agency wants to start going after products that pose the biggest safety risks — like the Hyland's homeopathic teething products that families say harmed hundreds of babies — more aggressively. Many low-risk homeopathic products would still stay on the market. The biggest change is the approach: Right now, FDA officials might suspect something’s dangerous about a particular product, investigate the manufacturer’s facility, and then take action based on violations in that facility, which weren’t necessarily the original concern. Now, the agency wants to make it clear that when there’s concern that a product might be posing a threat to consumers, they’ll take action regardless of manufacturing practices.

Backlash against the CDC's "banned words" is growing

There’s a growing chorus of criticism about a report that CDC staffers were told not to use seven specific words — including “evidence-based,” “diversity,” and “transgender” — in budget documents. Yesterday, Democratic lawmakers fired off a letter to the acting HHS secretary demanding exact details about why and how the words were being banned. An HHS official who asked not to be named told STAT it wasn’t accurate to say that CDC had been ordered not to use the seven words. Instead, he said, analysts were told that some phrasing might be more likely to win support for the CDC’s budget in the current Congress.

The leaders of the National Academies of Sciences, Medicine, and Engineering also spoke out in a statement: “If it is true that the terms 'evidence-based' and 'science-based' are being censored, it will have a chilling effect on U.S. researchers — who may question whether their advice is still welcome — as well as on the quality of the counsel actually rendered to government.”

EHF 2017: Lilly’s acute migraine treatment succeeds in late-stage study

For more than two decades, Eli Lilly and Company has been committed to the research and development of innovative, new migraine therapies. This month, Lilly presented Phase 3 data results for lasmiditan — an investigational, first-in-class molecule that selectively targets 5-HT1F receptors and has been designed for the acute treatment of migraine — at the European Headache Federation Congress in Rome. Lilly plans to submit lasmiditan to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the second half of 2018, as well as other markets globally in 2019. Learn more about lasmiditan.

Inside STAT: A program for college students with serious mental health conditions

Evan Jones's severe anxiety has made it tough to stay in school or hold a job. (KAYANA SZYMCZAK FOR STAT)

Evan Jones was excited when he signed up for a contemporary art class at community college — until the professor announced it would involve a lot of class participation. “That was the first class that I dropped,” he said. Jones’s persistent, severe anxiety has shadowed him for years. Then he found the NITEO program at Boston University. The program is dedicated to teaching coping skills to students who've had to leave college, in order to give them a shot at getting back into school or work while managing severe anxiety, depression, and other mental health conditions. The students in the program are a remarkable peer group — despite their differences, they each know, in a visceral way, what the others are going through. “I don’t feel like I’m the broken one,” Jones said. I spent time with NITEO students this semester — read here.

Lab Chat: Scientists grow cells to repair damaged muscles

Scientists have cooked up a new strategy to turn stem cells into skeletal muscle cells that can heal diseased muscles, at least in a mouse model. Here’s what April Pyle of UCLA told me about the research, published in Nature Cell Biology.

What does your strategy do?

We work with human pluripotent stem cells, which are endowed with the potential to make skeletal muscle. When we make muscle cells in a dish, there are multiple cell types in there. There are some neurons, some cardiomyocytes, and there was really no way to isolate muscle cells. So we identified new markers that can isolate and purify them.

What were those muscle cells able to do?

We wanted to enrich for cells that had the ability to transplant and be put in muscle that was diseased to restore functional muscle protein and muscle cells. Now we know we can restore muscle cells, but the question still is whether that muscle can function long-term after injury, like what happens in some kinds of muscular dystrophy.

Rubber bullets can cause serious injuries

Rubber and plastic bullets are often used as a crowd control tactic — but they can cause serious health problems and even death, according to a new analysis of more than two dozen studies. There were reports of more than 2,100 injuries blamed on rubber bullets, including 53 people who were killed. Another 300 were permanently disabled, with their disabilities ranging from blindness to the removal of a section of the bowel after being hit in the abdomen. The caveat: This is just a review, so there’s no consistent data standards between these studies. But, the authors say, their findings show there’s a real health risk tied to rubber and plastic bullets.