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Yesterday, my friend who lives in the Bay Area told me that I should be asking people about their peptide “stack,” which is where someone takes multiple peptides for presumably greater health benefit.
So, uh … are you taking peptides? What’s your stack? Or is this just a Bay Area bonanza?
A win for peptide proponents
An advisory panel to the Food and Drug Administration recommended yesterday that compounding pharmacies be allowed to manufacture four peptides, the little-researched but highly popular drugs that people are taking to improve their health.
It’s unusual for the FDA to go against the recommendations of the Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee, but the vote outcome reflected the tensions between FDA staff and the panel. Critics have said the panel was “stacked” by Kennedy — a self-declared peptides user — with people who stand to benefit from broader peptide access. The panel will vote Friday on additional compounds.
Who voted to approve these? STAT’s Sarah Todd and Lizzy Lawrence have the readout.
I regret to inform you …
… that there is another cyclospora outbreak.
Federal health officials are investigating a new outbreak of the diarrhea-causing parasite. We don’t know where or which products are linked, but they did announce 72 new cases.
The United States is already facing the largest cyclospora outbreak in recorded history. On Tuesday, the CDC announced that it had received reports of 4,173 confirmed cases, with thousands of additional cases still to be processed. Officials said they were focused on lettuce from Taylor Farms as the source of this separate, multistate outbreak. The company has recalled iceberg lettuce grown in central Mexico.
Wash your fruit and veggies, everyone. Read more.
Senate health panel delays vote on CDC director candidate
The search for the next CDC director drags on after a Senate committee postponed a vote on Erica Schwartz to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention until next week.
Health committee chair Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said he had enough votes to advance former deputy surgeon general Schwartz out of the committee, where the GOP holds a one-vote advantage. However, the vote on Schwartz was pushed back because too few senators showed up.
We’re now at 331 days since the agency had a full-time chief after health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sacked CDC Director Susan Monarez last summer. STAT’s Chelsea Cirruzzo has the scoop.
A new golden age of science?
Science advocates have spent 18 months accusing the Trump administration of what they see as shredding the existing social contract between academic researchers and the federal government, a relationship that made the United States the world’s most powerful engine of discovery. Now, the administration has a proposal to update that relationship.
Trump science adviser Michael Kratsios, who is not a scientist, has published a report that he hopes will usher in “A New Golden Age.” It calls for new grant funding mechanisms, embraces an ethos of funding people rather than projects, and pushes an image of innovation that centers industry over academia.
STAT’s Anil Oza breaks down the report and critics’ opinions of the document. Who called the report a “banger”? Read the story.
Autism advisory committees clash over priorities
Two similarly-named groups have spent months publicly sniping at each other as they jockey for sole authority on research into and funding for autism spectrum disorder.
Last week, the federally-appointed body — the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee — published a dense, 336-page strategic plan that the public had four days to review and leave comments. Several autism advocacy groups called for the comment window to be extended to 90 days, in response. The committee’s report will eventually head to Kennedy and Congress to help coordinate roughly $2 billion in federal funding for autism research and training programs, and they were slated to meet on July 31 to vote on the plan’s recommendations before postponing the meeting late Thursday.
The plan spends most of its pages discussing potential environmental factors for autism, even though the condition is overwhelmingly genetic in origin, and also discusses strategies to help people with profound autism.
What is profound autism? Depends who you ask, though it’s broadly considered to be autistic people with high support needs. But the federal body’s definition of this population diverges from prior definition, and the Independent Autism Coordinating Committee spent a chunk of its meeting yesterday discussing its own definition and plans to help that population. To quote Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the girls are fighting.
Which definition will win out? Stay tuned for the federal group’s eventual meeting. But as one member of the independent committee put it yesterday, “I think as a committee, we are quite lacking in resources.”
Where in the world is my insulin pen?
People with diabetes are in a bind as they encounter supply issues for their long-acting insulin pen made by Sanofi.
The Lantus Solostar pen containing 3 milliliters of insulin glargine has been running low for several weeks, though the issue is not technically considered a shortage by the Food and Drug Administration. Nonetheless, patients are having trouble getting the medication, as large pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens lose their stock.
Pharmacists are rushing to manage prescriptions within the bounds of what a patient’s insurance and condition will allow. Read more about the shortage from STAT’s Isabella Cueto.
What we’re reading
- A fatal reaction, Science
- Senate advances MAHA-friendly bill for food warning labels and junk food ad bans, STAT
- Sex work or starve: Aid workers in Nepal left jobless by USAID cuts turn to sex work to survive, AP
- Public health improvements stall amid Trump’s DEI crackdown, KFF Health News
- European regulators take steps to bolster clinical trial transparency, STAT
- Opinion: The U.S. pharmaceutical supply chain problem is not about China, STAT