Monica from ‘Friends’, RFK Jr., and how many ‘r’s are in ‘strawberry’

Want to stay on top of health news? Sign up to get our Morning Rounds newsletter in your inbox.

I just returned from a lovely two-week remote work/vacation trip to Oregon and this meme is my mood today.

If you love a health care meme, check out the weekly Meme Ward in my colleague Bob Herman’s newsletter Health Care, Inc. It normally goes out Mondays, but will go out this upcoming Tuesday because of Labor Day.

Speaking of Labor Day, don’t forget that you can get 25% off your first year of STAT+ with the code LABORDAY, good through Sep. 3. Now on to the news.

Three dairy farms in California undergoing testing for H5N1

California, the nation’s largest milk producer, is investigating three herds for possible H5N1 outbreaks. If confirmed, these would be the first confirmed cases in the state.

Herds in California are less at risk for the infection spread than in some other states, STAT’s Megan Molteni tells us, but many have feared that sooner or later, H5N1 would come to California.

 “It seemed like it might be only a matter of time,” said Terry Lehenbauer, a bovine disease epidemiologist and director of the Veterinary Medicine Teaching and Research Center at the University of California, Davis.

What RFK as Trump public health adviser would look like

Former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is angling for a place in a potential new Trump administration, pitching himself as a public health guy.

Even though he’s linked a rise in chronic disease, particularly among children, to vaccines, he’s recently tried to distance himself from those statements. He told House lawmakers during a hearing last September he has “never been anti-vax.”

RFK’s remarks and campaign materials indicate that he has plans for the FDA, including overhauling the user fee structure and requiring more safety studies on vaccines. He would change the NIH’s focus from infectious disease to chronic disease prevention, including “toxic chemicals (PFAS, glyphosate, neonics, etc.), air and water pollution, microplastics, electromagnetic pollution, ultra-processed foods, and pharmaceutical products.” He would pursue legal action against scientific journals for “publishing fake science to promote the mercantile ambitions” of various industries, including food and pharma.

STAT’s Isabella Cueto and Sarah Owermohle have an analysis of RFK’s positions and a fact-check from health experts evaluating his claims. Read more.

Maternity ward closings aren’t only happening in rural areas

Lots of areas have turned into maternity care deserts as hospitals close expensive labor and delivery wards. But while we popularly think of those closings as happening in rural areas and worsening urban–rural health disparities, STAT contributor Marissa Evans brings us news of the maternity ward desert growing in Los Angeles County.

Since 2021, 29 hospitals in California stopped delivering babies. Of the nearly 50 obstetrics departments that have closed over the past decade, 17 were in Los Angeles County.

For pregnant people, it’s difficult to figure out where to go and how to get a new care team, especially when nearby hospitals aren’t equipped to take on a high-risk pregnancy. And as one might imagine, the hospitals closing down labor and delivery units often serve Black and brown populations.

“We could not be as dismissive [of maternity ward closures] if it wasn’t [happening in] an overwhelmingly Black and brown neighborhood,” said Raena Granberry, director of maternal and reproductive health for the California Black Women’s Health Project. Read more.

Obesity drug also cut risk of dying from Covid

Last year, the hotly anticipated Select trial from Novo Nordisk showed that the obesity drug Wegovy had cardiovascular benefits beyond just weight loss — reducing the overall rate of major heart problems like heart attacks, stroke, or cardiovascular-related death by 20%.

The Select trial ran for five years, and the Covid-19 pandemic started in the middle of it. Knowing that the patients in the Select trial — who were overweight or had obesity and had heart disease — were more vulnerable to severe Covid, researchers started tracking Covid-related outcomes too.

“We realized that this was an unprecedented health event, and realized that we had the opportunity to potentially contribute to science,” study author Benjamin Scirica told STAT.

At the European Society of Cardiology’s annual meeting in London, researchers unveiled analysis showing that Wegovy cut the chances of dying from Covid-19 by roughly a third. Though patients contracted Covid at the same rate as placebo participants, 65 patients on placebo died from Covid, compared to 43 of those on the study drug.

Read more from STAT’s Andrew Joseph.

Carbon emissions per puff: A closer look at inhalers

While one might think of overly air-conditioned hospitals and single-use medical supply waste as a bigger driver of health care carbon emissions, researchers are looking at how asthma and COPD inhalers can be greener.

The most common types of inhalers, the classic “metered-dose” ones, use propellant gases to aerosolize medicine that patients inhale. But those gases — which switched over from ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons in the 2000s to the current hydrofluorocarbons — are greenhouse gases more powerful than carbon dioxide and contribute heavily to climate change.

In a new JAMA research letter, Stanford allergist and immunologist Jyothi Tirumalasetty and colleagues looked at how much Medicare and Medicaid were paying for inhalers in 2022 — and how many carbon equivalents they emitted.

Read my Q&A with Tirumalasetty for what Midwestern city’s electricity consumption is similar to the emissions from inhalers, and what pharmacy benefit manager formularies have to do with carbon emissions.

What Monica from ‘Friends’ has to do with PubMed

When you search “Marsha Reyngold” on PubMed, you won’t find the Memorial Sloan Kettering physician’s first-author publication from 2007, when she used her married name of Marsha Laufer. (She’s since switched back to using her current name when publishing.)

Even though she’s registered both names to her ORCID author identifier number, PubMed doesn’t search by ORCID unless the searcher specifically puts it in, and only draws up results based on name. This disadvantages many people, especially women, who are more likely to change their names after marriage, the National Civil Liberties Association argues in a new lawsuit.

The NCLA is suing the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health, which runs PubMed, over this issue, pointing out that the Internet Movie Database is capable of bringing up “Friends” actress Courteney Cox’s filmography when you search “Courtney Arquette,” and the same for judges in the Westlaw database.

“Because search results in PubMed do not return Dr. Reyngold’s full scientific contribution, she is disadvantaged when applying for various scientific grants, conferences, panel presentations, and the like,” NCLA lawyers wrote.

Like a bad student, AlphaFold is still just memorizing

Even though ChatGPT has been around for almost two years, it and other artificial intelligence chatbots still struggle to tell how many “r”s are in the word “strawberry.” Why? These models aren’t really using reasoning to answer your question.

 Biological AI models suffer from a similar problem, a recent study in Nature Communications says. One of the pinnacles of AI in the life sciences is AlphaFold, an AI platform developed by DeepMind that in 2020 essentially solved the problem of predicting a protein’s structure from its amino acid sequence. Touted as a discovery that will speed up drug development and that is rapidly improving, AlphaFold is an achievement…but still isn’t reasoning yet.

When given a sequence for a protein that can fold into two different structures, the AI failed to accurately predict both structures for 65% of the proteins for which it had training data. For seven proteins it hadn’t seen before, it failed on six of them, leading researchers to conclude that despite its good performance on most tasks, AlphaFold hasn’t learned the underlying physics of protein folding; it’s just memorized information and sometimes even favors that memorization over information suggesting alternative answers.

What we’re reading

• The case of the nearly 7,000 missing pancreases, Vox
• He got a new heart. Now this 34-year-old is fighting to fix the transplant system, Wall Street Journal
• Bugs, mold and mildew found in Boar’s Head plant linked to deadly listeria outbreak, CBS News
• Thoughts, takes, and burning biotech questions as the beginning of the end of the year approaches, STAT
• Tribal food assistance program in shambles after USDA warehouse consolidation, Buffalo’s Fire
• ‘It was stolen from me’: Black doctors are forced out of training programs at far higher rates than white residents, STAT