Salt substitutes, H5N1 bird flu, school nurses

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Good morning! Yesterday was a giant day for the (small? big?) Venn diagram overlap of STAT readers and One Tree Hill followers as a result of Sophia Bush posted a hyperlink to Matt Herper’s current story about vaccines on Instagram.

Word: I’m solely on season 3 of OTH myself, so please don’t ship spoilers to my inbox.

The CRISPR firms aren’t OK

Photograph illustration: Christine Kao/STAT; Photographs: Adobe

The gene enhancing instrument CRIPSR was supposed to alter medication — simply 5 years in the past, a Nobel Prize committee introduced that it “could make the dream of curing inherited ailments come true.” Billions of {dollars} have been spent chasing that dream, however key scientific hurdles remained unsolved. Now, even when firms obtain encouraging outcomes, that may’t appear to cease their shares from tanking.

Put merely, STAT’s Jason Mast writes, “there are surprisingly few locations at the moment the place you’ll be able to each remedy a illness with gene enhancing and generate profits.” For his newest story, Jason interviewed greater than 75 buyers, lecturers, executives, analysts, and staff to determine the place, precisely, the imaginative and prescient went off target.

Learn extra. (Come for the evaluation and keep for the similes. In a single part concerning the hype round CRISPR, Jason describes it “like dropping a 3D printer right into a medieval workshop.” Later, he says the instrument has turn into “as indispensable to lab scientists as whisks are to pastry cooks.”)

Some youngsters with complications get handled otherwise within the ED

Black kids and Hispanic or Latino kids who go to pediatric emergency departments due to a headache obtain fewer migraine diagnoses, fewer checks, and fewer intense therapies than white kids who are available in with the identical signs, in accordance with a research printed yesterday in Neurology.

The research analyzed greater than 160,400 visits by kids to 49 pediatric EDs between 2016 and 2022. Simply 28% of Black and Hispanic kids acquired a migraine prognosis in comparison with 46% of white kids. 4 % of Black and Hispanic kids received an MRI in comparison with 9% of white ones. And whereas there was no racial disparity within the variety of sufferers receiving any remedy, Black kids have been 37% extra possible than white ones to obtain simply oral meds, with none intravenous remedy, and 20% much less prone to be admitted to the hospital. Hispanic kids have been 54% extra prone to obtain oral meds and 35% much less prone to be admitted.

Additional analysis is required, the authors write, to grasp how these disparities find yourself affecting youngsters’ well being outcomes and to develop interventions to handle the inequities.

A troubling discovery in some Nevada cow herds

4 dairy herds in Nevada — beforehand thought to have the identical pressure of hen flu that’s been circulating in cows everywhere in the nation — have been truly contaminated with a special model of the virus, USDA introduced yesterday. The model of the virus these cows have is one which has been going round in wild birds that severely sickened a young person in Canada final 12 months and led to a dying in Louisiana final month.

The invention is a vital one as a result of it signifies that driving this virus out of cows can be more durable than the company has estimated, specialists advised STAT’s Helen Branswell. Learn extra on the brand new discovering and the way specialists are reacting.

In reward of faculty nurses

John Locher/AP

Do you know that within the U.S., there are extra safety employees in excessive faculties than there are full-time registered nurses? In a brand new First Opinion essay, RN Sherrie Web page Guyer argues that the philosophy of what makes a campus protected should shift “from concern to information.”

In fact, faculty shootings are an intractable tragedy in American tradition. However Guyer notes that medical emergencies requiring CPR or the administration of lifesaving treatment are nonetheless much more prone to happen at excessive faculties than a taking pictures. College nurses will also be the primary grownup {that a} scholar talks to after they want behavioral well being help.

Learn extra in Guyer’s essay on the advantages of arming each faculty with a nurse.

Salt substitutes as a option to decrease threat of dying, stroke

Scientists have lengthy understood that utilizing salt substitutes — which exchange among the sodium chloride with potassium chloride — will help decrease one’s blood stress. Just a few years in the past, for the primary time, a randomized managed trial of greater than 20,000 individuals demonstrated a direct affiliation between use of the substitutes and a lowered threat of stroke. Now, a subgroup evaluation from that research, printed yesterday in JAMA Cardiology, discovered that amongst individuals who have already had a stroke, utilizing salt substitutes was related to a considerably lowered threat of getting one other stroke, and of dying.

The subgroup evaluation adopted greater than 15,000 individuals with a historical past of stroke for a mean of 5 years. Particularly, these within the salt substitute group had a 30% relative discount of hemorrhagic stroke and 21% relative discount of stroke-related deaths in comparison with those that used common salt. The outcomes present that if scaled up, salt substitutes might be a easy and efficient intervention all over the world, the authors wrote.

Some excellent news re: a most cancers vaccine

9 sufferers with superior kidney most cancers who acquired an experimental vaccine tailor-made to their tumors’ particular mutations mounted an immune response to their illness and have remained cancer-free for 3 years, an early-phase medical trial has proven.

Most cancers vaccines developed with completely different molecular recipes are nonetheless of their early levels, specialists advised STAT’s Liz Cooney. The research demonstrates the potential of personalised vaccines to alter the course of sure most cancers varieties, however bigger, longer trials are wanted to substantiate this method. Learn extra on the science.