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Good morning. Thanks for sticking with us in the dog days of August. We’ve got a lot of news for you below.
Two people have died in cyclospora outbreak
Two people in Michigan have died in the cyclospora outbreak there, state health officials announced yesterday. These are the first confirmed deaths in the country related to the parasite, per the AP.
Cyclosporiasis is rarely fatal, but both people had underlying health conditions that may have been exacerbated by the intestinal illness and dehydration caused by the parasite, according to the state health department. Both people got sick before affected iceberg lettuce was recalled.
Eli Lilly will allow more special retatrutide access
Six weeks after STAT’s Lizzy Lawrence reported that Eli Lilly granted a single 79-year-old patient special access to retatrutide, an unapproved obesity drug, the company confirmed yesterday that it will allow other patients to apply for early access. At least a handful of clinicians had tried to seek similar expanded access for their own patients in that time, but most had not received clear answers from the drugmaker.
The announcement came after Lizzy and Elaine Chen asked the company about the confusion around a potential compassionate use program for the drug. Read more on where things stand.
Trans federal employees sue over revoked coverage
Federal employees and their families sued the Trump administration yesterday for prohibiting insurance coverage of gender-affirming care. The class-action lawsuit argues that the mandate, implemented this year, presents even greater barriers to potentially lifesaving care and has forced people to leave government employment. (The employees filed administrative claims with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission before pursuing a lawsuit, hence the midyear delay.)
Millions of federal workers, including an estimated 39,400 trans people, get their health insurance from the impacted programs: Federal Employees Health Benefits and Postal Service Health Benefits. Gender-affirming care has been available for coverage under these plans since 2015, after the Obama administration lifted a previous ban. Over the last decade, gender-affirming medical and surgical care flourished as both public and private insurance coverage expanded. But since reentering office, the Trump administration has attempted to suppress this health care once more. As early as this month, a federal rule could be finalized prohibiting Medicare and Medicaid from covering trans care. Similar lawsuits are likely to follow.
Why it’s so hard to study involuntary treatment
Since 1999, New York state has given judges the power to mandate outpatient psychiatric treatment for people with a history of serious mental illness, hospitalizations, or violence related to mental illness. Over the ensuing decades, this sort of involuntary treatment has only become more common, while the evidence gets murkier.
A new report tries to clear things up amid renewed debate and Trump administration support for the practice. But it’s a tricky subject: “We can only measure certain outcomes,” said Bevin Croft, one of the authors. “We can’t measure the impact of going to be picked up by the cops. We can’t measure with quantitative data the impact on a person’s self-esteem, or a person’s relationships, or a person’s motivation to get a job or get on with their lives when they’re under a court order.”
The report’s conclusions divided experts, including the state officials who requested it. Read more from STAT’s O. Rose Broderick on where people landed.
$5.4 million
That’s the estimated societal cost of the 2025 measles outbreak in New Mexico, in which 100 cases were confirmed and one person died. The economic analysis, published yesterday in Annals of Internal Medicine, incorporated the cost of public health response, direct medical costs, and productivity losses. Public health response made up the highest proportion of the costs at $3.2 million. About $2.1 million of that went to vaccination labor, supplies, and doses.
As measles continues to spread in even greater numbers this year, we can expect to see even higher societal costs.
Kennedy and Oz try to myth-bust Medicaid cuts
The Trump administration isn’t cutting Medicaid, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. commented at a press stop recently. That’s just a “myth people believe,” he said. But as STAT’s Chelsea Cirruzzo reports, the truth is more complicated than that.
“What’s challenging is that [the One Big Beautiful Bill] set in motion various policy changes that affect state Medicaid programs and not all at once,” said policy analyst Amber Bellazaire. Those changes will significantly alter Medicaid enrollment rates and eligibility, according to expert analysis. Read more on where we’re headed.
What we’re reading
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The campaign to force genital exams on girl athletes, The Cut
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Running on empty: Can a red HIV outreach van outlast federal cuts? The 19th
- California Supreme Court sides with Gilead in ‘duty’ to innovate case, STAT
- Kill the ticks, The Atlantic
- Opinion: How Josée became one of the 7.9% of Québécois who die by assisted suicide, STAT