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The transformation of organ transplantation
When you imagine what organ transplants look like, you probably picture an Igloo cooler gripped by a medical worker who’s just leapt off a helicopter. If you’re of a certain generation, perhaps you imagine the classic scene from “One Tree Hill,” where one such worker trips, sending Dan’s heart skidding across the hospital floor, only to be eaten by a dog. (Sorry, I know it’s early.)
The point is: thanks to new methods embraced over the past five years, both those pictures are out of date. Technological advances like warm and cold perfusion, along with an ethically complex shift in determining when and how retrieval can begin, are transforming the field of organ donation. This has led to more people getting new organs after shorter waiting periods and fewer people dying while on the wait list for a transplant. But as STAT’s Elizabeth Cooney reports, experts still have concerns about equitable access and much steeper costs. Read more on what these new methods look like, where they’re happening, and what might be next.
Disabled CDC staff still missing accommodations
After permission to work from home was temporarily revoked in September, disabled CDC workers are still struggling to get needed accommodations, according to a letter sent to NIH Director and acting CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya from Yolanda Jacobs, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 2883, which represents CDC staff.
“This is not a policy dispute. It is a matter of employee safety, legal compliance, and organizational integrity, and it is causing real, ongoing harm,” Jacobs wrote in the letter, sent Thursday. Employees have experienced “acute medical events directly triggered by the sudden loss of accommodation,” she added, including veterans with disabilities who have been hospitalized and forced to take leave. Others have been classified as AWOL due to disabilities that limit them from coming into the office. At the CDC’s campus, workers who need accommodations like lighting adjustments or a different chair must wait months for approval, Jacobs wrote.
Neither the formal HHS policy nor President Trump’s executive order to return to in-person work required CDC to cancel existing accommodations, Jacobs continued. She also noted that CDC staff only received a copy of the new policy after STAT’s O. Rose Broderick obtained it in December and reported on the details.
HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon told STAT that Jacobs’ claims are inaccurate. “Telework has been granted in appropriate cases as an interim accommodation while requests are processed, and we are working through those requests as quickly as possible,” Nixon wrote over email. “Assertions that employees are being forced back to the office without accommodations or that the Department is ignoring disability protections are simply false.”
30
That’s the age — down from 40 — at which people should start considering statins or other measures to manage cholesterol, according to new guidelines released Friday by leading medical organizations. The updated recommendations take a more sweeping approach for when and how to prevent and treat cardiovascular diseases caused by the hardening and narrowing of arteries. “I don’t appreciate this story,” one 30-year-old STAT reporter said Friday. Nevertheless, read more of this important reporting from Liz to understand the change.
What if ‘The Fugitive’ was real?
In honor of last night’s Oscars ceremony, Alex Hogan’s latest video considers a critically important question: How would STAT reporters react if the events represented in “The Fugitive,” which took home the best picture award more than three decades ago, really happened?
In the film, a doctor played by Harrison Ford discovers that a fictional pharmaceutical giant is falsifying data in order to get a blockbuster treatment for coronary artery disease approved. “You have no idea how current that was at the moment,” Matt Herper told Alex. “This movie came out the year before the big study that proved statins prevent second heart attacks.”
How would STAT tackle the news? At first, “just invert the pyramid,” said Damian Garde, when asked how to approach the initial allegations. Watch the video to hear how he’d write the lede of that first story, and what reporting steps Bob Herman, Lizzy Lawrence, and Allison DeAngelis would take first for a deeper dive.
Should maternal morbidity surveillance expand?
By 2017, all U.S. states had incorporated a checkbox on death certificates to indicate if a person had been pregnant at the time of — or within a year of — their death. The system, while imperfect, has helped reveal the scale of the problem. In a study published today in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, researchers argue that a similar expansion is needed to capture severe maternal morbidity, meaning the most serious pregnancy complications that could result in death, long-term hospitalization, or disability after giving birth.
In both the U.S. and Canada, surveillance and reporting for these complications typically ends after delivery. But the new study that analyzed data from an Ontario cohort through six weeks postpartum found the current practice misses more than 40% of cases with severe complications. Similar research in the U.S. has found that including the periods before and after birth in morbidity surveillance would identify an additional 22% to 49% of severe cases.
A declaration of hope, dashed
Mindy Uhrlaub learned that she carried the mutated gene that causes the fatal neurodegenerative disease ALS as her own mother was dying from it. It was a dark time, but over the years, she put her faith in researchers and other activists, joining more than a dozen observational research studies. “With every spinal tap I suffered through and nerve conduction test I endured, I told myself that we were getting closer to a cure,” Uhrlaub writes in a new First Opinion essay. It was “a tremendous declaration of hope.”
But everything changed at the beginning of the second Trump administration. Read more about the series of events that have left Uhrlaub, in her own words, terrified.
What we’re reading
Florida is trying to ignore measles until it can’t, Atlantic
Since Dobbs, New York Review of Books
- Opinion: Congress must pass legislation to ensure Medicare covers breakthrough medical technologies, STAT
- Why do mind-altering drugs make people feel better? New Yorker
