{"id":483114,"date":"2026-06-04T18:15:14","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T18:15:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/483114\/"},"modified":"2026-06-04T18:15:14","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T18:15:14","slug":"hiv-nih-ebola-gender-care-puberty-morning-rounds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/483114\/","title":{"rendered":"HIV, NIH, Ebola, gender care, puberty: 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. You may have noticed a missing link in yesterday\u2019s issue. You can read Sarah Todd\u2019s great story on ultra-processed food research and policy here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ebola update: Case numbers, pushback<\/p>\n

A potpourri of Ebola news: The Democratic Republic of the Congo is making its way through samples of hundreds of suspected Ebola cases, and as it does, the size of the outbreak has shrunk dramatically. As of Wednesday<\/a>, the country reported 363 confirmed cases. In a WHO press conference, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Gheybreyesus said there were now 116 suspected cases, which, if confirmed, would bring the outbreak total to just under 500 \u2014 less than half the size it was thought to be late last week. But Craig Spencer, Ebola survivor and Brown University public health professor, told STAT he\u2019s hearing from people on the ground that there could still be a lot of undetected cases.<\/p>\n

The union representing CDC employees, the American Federation of Government Employees Local 2883, is publicly objecting to the Trump administration\u2019s plan to force Americans who\u2019ve been exposed to Ebola to quarantine in Kenya. But Gheybreyesus demurred when asked his thoughts about the U.S. plan, saying, \u201cThey can do whatever they think is right for them.\u201d He also expressed appreciation for the U.S.\u2019s \u201cstrong commitment\u201d to the efforts to contain the outbreak. \u2014 Helen Branswell<\/p>\n

Trump to strip job protections of top NIH officials<\/p>\n

President Trump issued an executive order yesterday redefining the positions within the civil service sector, a change that would make it easier to terminate federal workers by classifying them as political appointees. It would affect many high-level officials who oversee the review and disbursements of grants at the National Institutes of Health.<\/p>\n

Biomedical researchers and policy experts decried the change<\/a> when it was proposed this spring. STAT\u2019s Anil Oza has the latest details<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Scientists uncover a new hiding spot for HIV<\/p>\n

Scientists have long understood HIV to be an expert of evasion. The virus attacks the immune system by infiltrating white blood cells known as T cells, specifically ones that express a surface protein called CD4. Once inside, it copies its DNA into the cells\u2019 genomes. Antiviral drugs can stop HIV from replicating, but if a patient ever stops taking them, those cells start pumping out HIV particles and the infection roars back.<\/p>\n

A real cure hinges on ferreting out these latent reservoirs of HIV DNA and eliminating them. Researchers have hoped they could send CRISPR<\/a> to those cells to cut out the HIV DNA lurking there or design immunotherapies<\/a> to hunt them down.<\/p>\n

Complicating those efforts, researchers in China have discovered HIV has another trick. It can change the identity of the cells it infects. In a paper<\/a> published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine, the team reported that HIV can drive gene expression changes in T cells, turning off their CD4 proteins and turning on a protein called CD8. The new finding challenges long-held biological wisdom that T cell identity is fixed and expands the types of cells that need to be targeted in order to completely flush HIV DNA out of a patient\u2019s body. \u2014 Megan Molteni\u00a0<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot we don\u2019t know about male puberty<\/p>\n

When girls experience early puberty, we know they\u2019re at higher risk for endometriosis, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer, eating disorders, and more, including all-cause mortality. Research on the timing of male puberty is much more preliminary, though early studies have found similar correlations to timing and harmful health impacts. But given the fact that men suffer poorer health outcomes across their lifespans, some clinicians believe that a better understanding of puberty could be transformative.<\/p>\n

\u201cIncreased knowledge on factors regulating timing of male puberty may be the key to understanding long-term health in males,\u201d said Anders Juul, a pediatric endocrinologist who advocates for more research. STAT contributor Ashleigh N. DeLuca wrote about this under-examined gap and what needs to happen next. Read more<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Senate hearing repeats talking points on gender care<\/p>\n

A Senate health committee hearing<\/a> yesterday highlighted persistent political debate around gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Questions and testimony largely lingered on well-trodden ground.<\/p>\n

Senators and witnesses with opposing perspectives all claimed that the American Medical Association supported their position. Sen. Bill Cassidy, for example, cited a media statement from the AMA calling evidence for surgery on trans minors \u201cinsufficient.\u201d Sen. Bernie Sanders asserted that the AMA supports affirming care. What\u2019s the truth?<\/a> The AMA has a policy supporting gender-affirming care, which it has not revoked. But the group, which wants to maintain a friendly relationship with the Trump administration, did release the statement Cassidy mentioned. The AMA later said that it requested a correction from the New York Times in particular, and emphasized the importance of preserving access. The Times said it did not receive<\/a> such a request.<\/p>\n

Kurt Miceli, a speaker representing the anti-gender-affirming-care and anti-DEI group Do No Harm, repeated a claim that most children who experience gender dysphoria will grow out of the feeling. But a recent literature review<\/a> of research on desistance, most of which is decades old, found that this claim is \u201cwithout merit,\u201d as the studies are methodologically flawed and based on outdated assumptions.<\/p>\n

Prominent detransitioner Chloe Cole spoke about her experience with what she calls coercive medical abuse. Cole advocated for bans on gender-affirming care and claimed \u201cthere is no such thing as a child being born in the wrong body.\u201d Democratic senators opposite her expressed sympathy for her experience\u00a0but argued that medical malpractice suits are the better way to address harm.<\/p>\n

No transgender youth spoke at the hearing, but Sen. Tim Kaine spoke directly to them. \u201cIf you\u2019re a trans kid watching this hearing,\u201d he said, \u201cthere is some intentional effort to make you feel bad about yourself. But you got a lot of people who love you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Docs use AI scribes. Patients could, too.<\/p>\n

More than a quarter of U.S. medical practices use ambient scribes, which are AI-based listening and note-taking tools. But now, a growing number of developers are pitching apps that will do similar work directly for the patients, offering extra help to remember what a doctor says and track multiple encounters across health systems.<\/p>\n

As STAT\u2019s Katie Palmer writes, every patient these days has a recording device in their pocket. But these tools \u2014 which are already garnering major investments \u2014 also raise concerns about data privacy when health information is stored outside a provider\u2019s domain. Read more<\/a> from Katie on what these apps are offering and the cultural and legal questions that come with them.<\/p>\n

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

Correction: The item on gender-affirming care has been updated to reflect the New York Times\u2019 statement on the AMA media comment.<\/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":483115,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[103,397,396,61,60],"class_list":["post-483114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=483114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483114\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/483115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=483114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=483114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=483114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}