{"id":452437,"date":"2026-02-04T02:50:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-04T02:50:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/452437\/"},"modified":"2026-02-04T02:50:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-04T02:50:10","slug":"measles-ice-minnesota-texas-morning-rounds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/452437\/","title":{"rendered":"Measles, ICE, Minnesota, Texas: Morning Rounds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Get your daily dose of health and medicine every weekday with STAT\u2019s free newsletter Morning Rounds.\u00a0Sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Good morning. Coyotes were seen trotting<\/a> across the frozen Charles River yesterday. I mostly dug out my car. \u00a0<\/p>\n

RFK Jr. targets the \u2018spiritual malaise\u2019 behind addiction<\/p>\n

In an announcement yesterday, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. provided new details about the sweeping but vague addiction initiative<\/a> that the White House rolled out last week, unveiling a new program to address homelessness and plans to involve religious organizations in the government\u2019s response to the addiction epidemic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kennedy said the effort was an attempt to address what he called a nationwide \u201cspiritual malaise,\u201d and to align government, nonprofits, and the private sector behind a structure that incentivizes high-quality care and, by extension, long-term recovery. Read more<\/a> from STAT\u2019s Lev Facher on what that means. And before you click, guess which Kennedy cousin showed up to support.<\/p>\n

How HPV vaccination status could determine cancer screening rates<\/p>\n

As we reported here<\/a> last month, new federal guidelines recommend that women ages 30 to 65 can skip pap smears and do an HPV test every five years. But as the first generation of women to be vaccinated against HPV in their adolescence grows up (hello), new research suggests that some people could go even longer between screenings.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A study out of Norway, published yesterday in the Annals of Internal Medicine<\/a>, found that as long as a woman is vaccinated by age 30, it\u2019s both cost effective and causes less harm for her to do cervical cancer screenings less often than the five-year recommendation. The exact intervals laid out by researchers depend not only on the age at vaccination, but also the type of vaccine received and how the scientists weighed costs against risks in the calculations. Generally, someone vaccinated between ages 25 and 30 could reduce screenings to 10-year intervals, while someone vaccinated between 12 and 24 could be screened just two or three times in their life, per the study.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The data on individualized recommendations could be particularly valuable to American physicians and families as Kennedy, who has led an overhaul<\/a> of American vaccine standards, has long-standing connections to litigation<\/a> over Merck\u2019s HPV vaccine.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The peptide with big claims but limited data<\/p>\n

You may not have heard of BPC-157 \u2014 but maybe you have. The peptide, like many that have gained traction with MAHA<\/a>, is having a moment. Popular podcasters, wellness clinics, and patients are gravitating to the chemical for relief from health conditions that aren\u2019t always well-managed with traditional treatments. But there\u2019s one problem: \u201cThe amount of hype to evidence is just so skewed, it\u2019s crazy,\u201d physician and researcher Flynn McGuire said. He put it even more bluntly in an email: BPC-157 \u201cshould not be used by humans.\u201d<\/p>\n

Too late. In a thorough write-up, Sara Talpos spoke with people who have taken the peptide. Some described benefits like helping the body heal more quickly and reducing pain. But others report side effects like full-body itchiness, intense anxiety, or anhedonia. Anecdotal evidence like this is some of the only data we have on what these drugs can do in humans.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Read more<\/a> from Sara about how BPC-157 became a buzzy, mainstream MAHA supplement. As Talpos writes, the story begins in a laboratory in post-communist Croatia. We\u2019re publishing this investigation by\u00a0Undark, where Sara is a contributing editor.<\/p>\n

\u2018The fear is absolutely wreaking havoc\u2019<\/p>\n

At Children\u2019s Minnesota, the emergency room usually sees about 130 patients per day. But lately, amid an ICE crackdown in the city and across the country, they\u2019re seeing around 100. Bryan Fate, a pediatrician there, noted this is particularly unusual given the rough flu season. \u201cIt has an eerie feeling that there was during the pandemic,\u201d he said. \u201cThe fear is absolutely wreaking havoc.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not just in Minneapolis \u2014 doctors across the country are describing harrowing consequences for patients who delayed seeking care or skipped it altogether. At one Los Angeles clinic, no-show rates tripled last summer during a bout of intense immigration raids. STAT\u2019s Daniel Payne spoke to doctors<\/a> about what they\u2019re seeing and how they\u2019re trying to help.<\/p>\n

Measles confirmed at two ICE facilities<\/p>\n

In related news: Two people detained at a Texas immigration detention center were confirmed to have measles infections, multiple outlets reported<\/a> Sunday night and Monday. A separate case was also confirmed<\/a> in an Arizona ICE facility last week. In both instances, the Department of Homeland Security said in statements that the ICE Health Service\u00a0Corps \u201cimmediately\u201d took steps to quarantine the detainees, and that all movement within the facilities had stopped.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the first nine months of the Trump administration, the number of people held in ICE detention facilities rose 50%, per KFF<\/a>. Concerns that people in detention receive inadequate health care are longstanding<\/a>, but the Trump administration has reduced oversight<\/a> of these facilities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Is cancer immunotherapy more effective in the morning?\u00a0<\/p>\n

It may sound surprising, but it\u2019s not a new idea \u2014 researchers have previously noticed that cancer patients who get immunotherapy infusions in the morning seem to do much better than those treated later in the day. Still, many have doubts about the phenomenon.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now, a randomized trial published yesterday in Nature Medicine is drawing renewed attention to the idea. In the trial, advanced lung cancer patients who got chemo and immunotherapy infusions before 3 p.m. had a 60% reduction to the risk of progression compared to those who received infusions after 3 p.m. That result, while not fully convincing to skeptics, is raising eyebrows. Read more<\/a> from STAT\u2019s Angus Chen on the study and its caveats.<\/p>\n

What we\u2019re reading<\/p>\n

What to know about Catherine O\u2019Hara\u2019s rare heart condition, dextrocardia, STAT<\/a><\/p>\n

NIH worker who criticized Trump seeks whistle-blower protection, The New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n

AI could soon renew prescriptions without clinician help. Should the FDA make sure it\u2019s safe?\u00a0STAT<\/a><\/p>\n

HHS is using AI tools from Palantir to target \u2018DEI\u2019 and \u2018gender ideology\u2019 in grants, Wired<\/a><\/p>\n

First Opinion: Plain language abstracts can help reduce misuse of science, STAT<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Get your daily dose of health and medicine every weekday with STAT\u2019s free newsletter Morning Rounds.\u00a0Sign up here.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":452438,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[49,48,84,5432,392],"class_list":["post-452437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=452437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452437\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/452438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=452437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=452437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=452437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}