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Good morning! To start, a postscript on Anthropic’s biological breakthrough. Last week, the AI company said Claude had discovered a new enzyme system with a series of repeats in DNA “reminiscent of CRISPR.” It turns out University of Copenhagen professor Mario Rodríguez Mestre has been studying the same set of enzymes, using Anthropic’s AI to write code and draft manuscripts as he prepares to publish his findings. “For me, the most important question is not ‘Were [these molecules] already known?’ They were,” the professor told The New York Times. What he wonders is whether AI relied partly on his work for its insights.
Anthropic said Claude isn’t trained on user transcripts, so even if Mestre had shared his work with Claude, that wouldn’t have influenced the AI’s findings. But this raises yet more important questions about how AI makes discoveries, and how it credits the human labor that helps make its discoveries possible.
Read on for a fascinating interview with the woman who wrote the book on vaccine hesitancy, and new research on stopping Alzheimer’s disease.
Cases of measles, ebola, and dengue fever continue to rise
It’s a rough start of the week for public health. In Congo, the number of Ebola cases has climbed past 8,000, according to new data from the country’s health ministry. Despite widespread containment efforts, experts say the outbreak is spreading to new parts of the country and remains “out of control.” Health care workers are stretched so thin that Congolese people are struggling to find medical professionals for even routine primary care visits.
The news comes as confirmed measles cases in Pennsylvania jumped again to 903, with nearly a third among people under 18. And in Tampa Bay, Fla., residents are struggling with a “wildly unusual” dengue fever outbreak that has caused at least one fatality and 190 infections. Dengue doesn’t normally spread in the U.S., but climate change has allowed the mosquito that carries the virus to spread farther north.
Trump officials ask SCOTUS to enforce ban on gender-affirming care in federal prisons
The Trump administration filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court Monday asking to be allowed to enforce restrictions on gender-affirming care in federal prisons. The filing comes after a lower court told the administration it couldn’t immediately carry out the policy, which stems from a Trump executive order that halts surgeries and hormone therapy, though mental health services can continue.
ACLU attorneys called the policy “a direct threat to the wellbeing of transgender people” and “an open violation of their fundamental rights.” And the Federal Bureau of Prisons does not dispute that gender dysphoria can cause depression, suicidal thoughts, and anxiety, among other issues. But Trump officials have said the ban on care is necessary so federal money isn’t spent on “conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.”
Researchers slow neurodegeneration in mice by barring T cells from the brain
While much of Alzheimer’s research remains focused on clumps of protein linked to the neurologic disease, there’s growing evidence the immune system plays a key role in driving neuronal death and damage. A study led by Washington University in St. Louis researchers suggests that stopping certain immune cells from entering the brain could limit neurodegeneration.
Researchers took mice used to model Alzheimer’s and other tauopathies, diseases marked by a buildup of the protein tau, and treated them with an antibody that blocks CXCR3, a molecule immune cells use to home in on sites of infection and damage. Blocking CXCR3 kept T cells from accumulating in the mice brains, and the loss of brain tissue in memory-related brain regions was 40% less in treated animals. These rodents also performed better on standard memory tests than their untreated counterparts, even though both groups had similar levels of tau.
It’s unclear for now whether the findings, published in the journal Neuron, will hold up in people. But the work suggests a way of slowing neurodegeneration without requiring drugs that reach the brain, as current Alzheimer’s therapies do. — Jonathan Wosen
A sociologist on why parents don’t vaccinate their children
Are parents who don’t vaccinate their children selfish and stupid, as they’ve been called by critics? Or are they acting logically?
Jennifer Reich, a sociologist at the University of Colorado, has spent the better part of two decades speaking to families about their immunization decisions. And she has come to see parents’ decisions not to vaccinate as an outgrowth of the push for them to be savvy consumers in an increasingly complex world, to make informed decisions about everything that could affect their children’s health.
“Vaccine hesitancy, in a lot of ways, is a logical outcome to the cultural pressures we’ve put before families,” she said. Read more of her fascinating insights here.
The health of America’s children is a national security crisis
The health of American children has declined alarmingly over the past 20 years. According to a recent JAMA study, U.S. children were 1.8 times more likely to die than kids in other industrialized countries. As Stanley McChrystal, a former commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan, and two professors argue in a new First Opinion, the impacts of this crisis are far reaching.
“Concerns about military readiness, workforce shortages, rising health care costs, affordability, and America’s ability to compete in an increasingly challenging world seem to play on a loop without any sign of progress,” they write. “ Maybe that’s because these challenging and seemingly intractable problems are usually treated as separate crises requiring separate solutions. They are not.” Read their piece on how lessons from the 1950s can help us out of the current crisis.
Is another federal policy shake up on the way?
It’s been hard to keep up with the slew of health policy changes since Trump took office. And the midterms could bring yet another set of head spinning shifts, especially if Democrats take control of Congress.
STAT’s Daniel Payne spoke with nearly a dozen leaders and lobbyists representing the health industry to come up with the most important questions about federal policy after the midterms. Read on to find out what keeps these experts up at night.