drug prices, mpox, extreme heat, animal research

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Thursday was my two-year STAT birthday. I can’t believe I’ve been here so long!

As a gift for the occasion, the STAT team has created a special code for you: until the end of the weekend, the code BRITTANY30 will give you a 30% discount on your first year of STAT+ (I feel so cool!).

Now on to a huge deal that I knew 100% nothing about before I started working at STAT: the Medicare Inflation Reduction Act drug price negotiations.

Medicare announces negotiated drug prices

Yesterday was a big day in the world of pharmaceutical and health policy: Medicare released the prices of the first ten drugs it examined under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The medications include drugs for blood clots, diabetes, heart failure and arthritis.

Our DC agency was busy offering you STAT+ coverage:

• The drugs negotiated included Januvia, Entresto and Enbrel, each of which saw a price drop of more than 30% compared to their 2021 list prices. But that doesn’t mean seniors will see a 30% reduction in what they pay. See Rachel Cohrs Zhang’s story for all the details.

• President Biden tweeted a graph showing how much the negotiations saved Medicare compared to list prices for the drugs. But Rachel tells us the president is exaggerating: Medicare pays no list price, and current prices are secret.

• Speaking of bragging rights, who gets it? John Wilkerson and Rachel (who was a busy beaver yesterday) tell us how Harris and Trump are shaping the deals.

If animals have solved health problems, humans haven’t

STAT’s Nicholas St. Fleur has a fascinating Q&A with cardiologist and evolutionary biologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, who thinks about medicine through a “zoobiquitic” lens: looking at hard-to-solve medical problems in humans and wondering whether animals have already solved that problem in the future. ways that people’s bodies haven’t.

“[Evolution] is research and development into the highest dose of steroids ever,” said Natterson-Horowitz.

She gave the example of how many women stop breastfeeding because of a painful infection called mastitis. She turned to dairy experts about how they solved this problem in cows. “There are a hundred times more scientific studies written on the prevention of mastitis in cows than in women,” she told Nick.

Read on to learn more about this fresh perspective on medicine, including looking to giraffes for solutions to heart failure, elephants for cancer resistance, and why human pride keeps us from inspecting these potential cures.

The good, the bad and the not-great mpox news

• The bad: Swedish authorities announced that a person who recently visited the region of Africa and experienced the recently declared mpox public health emergency contracted a clade I version of the virus. This is the first reported case of clade I outside the African continent. U.S. officials previously warned doctors against proceeding warning for cases of mpox in people who have recently traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo or nearby countries.
• The Not-Great: STAT’s Jason Mast tells us that an antiviral drug for smallpox that authorities hoped would be effective against MPox is no better than a placebo. The drug tecovirimat, approved by the FDA in 2018 as TPOXX, was part of an NIH co-sponsored trial in the DRC, where mpox is endemic. People infected with MPOX and treated in hospital did not respond faster to tecovirimat than to placebo – but both groups experienced less than half the average death rate, suggesting that just receiving care in hospital helped .
• The good: Helen Branswell also brings us a Q&A with the CEO of Bavarian Nordic, maker of the mpox vaccine Jynneos, about the company’s vaccine inventory. Since the 2022 MPox outbreak, the manufacturer has ramped up its production capacity and says it can deliver millions of vaccines next year – although that depends on orders, of which it currently has only one.

Follow STAT’s mpox reporting here.

Summer and life are not easy

The heat in summer is a major problem for people with disabilities – often in ways that are not obvious to able-bodied people.

“When you wear an artificial limb, it encases that residual limb in a sealed, airtight material,” says David Gissen, an amputee. “You don’t wrap your arms or legs in plastic when it’s hot outside. But if you are an amputee, you wear a leg like that.”

Longtime triathalonist Patty Glatfelter saw her relationship with the outdoors change when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which disrupts the body’s ability to send signals to the nerves and is even worse above 80 degrees.

She needs to know her limits. On a recent trip to Santa Fe, NM, “we were just walking down the street, waiting at a stoplight, and I felt myself starting to get weaker, so I looked for a shady spot,” she said. “And then, suddenly, my legs broke and I fell to the sidewalk.”

Read more from STAT’s Timmy Broderick about how the heat is affecting people in tangible and hard ways.

Summer Summer is Ending, Venison Sausage Fall is Coming (Along with New Risks)

I grew up in an area where some – but not all – of the kids were taken out of school when deer season started. Who doesn’t envy the fact that they get to skip school to do something fun with the family? New research in JAMA Network Open looks at shootings at the beginning of the deer hunting season in rural counties to better understand the relationship between gun prevalence and gun violence – and the results may be surprising.

The analysis, which mapped shootings in the Gun Violence Archive in the weeks before and after the start of deer hunting season in each of the 854 counties, showed that there was a statistically significant increase in shootings in the first and second week after deer season started. even if hunting accidents were excluded.

Considering that the increase in shootings was not due to hunting accidents and was also more pronounced with short guns than with the long guns typically used in hunting, the authors suggested that gun violence is not solely due to weapons in a certain place. or population, but the increased influx of weapons into public and private spaces.

How people with disabilities are excluded from clinical trials

Earlier this week, the National Council on Disability released a report detailing how several federal agencies are implicitly and explicitly excluding people with disabilities from clinical trials. For example, 90% of people with Down syndrome also develop Alzheimer’s diseasebut they are regularly excluded from drug research.

“How can this population benefit from these potentially life-changing treatments if they are excluded from the trials? And how can anyone know what the efficacy and safety of these therapies are for this population – and one of the most affected populations? Exclusion demands too high a price,” says NCD vice-president Emily Voorde in a press release.

Read more from STAT’s Timmy Broderick, including the city’s proposed solutions to the problem.

What we read

• An alternative to the smear test is here, no speculum required, New York Times
• Most black hospitals in the South closed long ago. Their impact continues, KFF Health News
• Lykos Therapeutics Lays Off 75% of Staff After FDA Rejects MDMA-Assisted Therapy, STAT
• Operating the perfect cooling center is harder than it seems, Bloomberg
• The fight against DEI programs shifts to medical care, Wall Street Journal
• Gilead should be held responsible for the harm caused by patent hopping of an HIV treatment, STAT