Top news stories from AMA Morning Rounds®: Week of April 10, 2023

Read AMA Morning Rounds®’ most popular stories in medicine and public health from the week of April 10, 2023–April 14, 2023.

The New York Times (4/13, Belluck) reports, “After a federal appeals court imposed several barriers to access to [mifepristone] late Wednesday night, the Justice Department announced on Thursday that it would seek emergency relief from the justices, asking them to block the ruling while a fast-tracked appeal moved forward.” Also on Thursday, “a federal judge in another mifepristone lawsuit issued an order that required the FDA not to limit access to the drug in much of the country.” According to the Times, “Legal experts said the dueling federal court orders could make it more likely that the Supreme Court will need to resolve the status” of the pill.

Politico (4/13, Cheney, Gerstein, Ollstein) reports that Attorney General Merrick Garland “warned that permitting judges to second-guess drug approval decisions would invite future challenges going far beyond” the drug in question. AMA President Jack Resneck, Jr., MD, “issued a similar warning Thursday morning in response to the 5th Circuit’s ruling, saying the decision would still roll back mifepristone access, favor ideology and pseudoscience over facts, harm patients and establish dangerous precedent of judges without scientific training overriding FDA expertise.”

Editor’s Note: Wednesday’s decision from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is a profoundly dangerous step backwards on access to mifepristone. Read the full statement from AMA President Jack Resneck Jr., MD.

USA Today (4/12, Alltucker) reports, “The Biden administration’s drug czar on Wednesday announced that illicit fentanyl spiked with the animal tranquilizer xylazine is an ‘emerging threat,’ a designation that will allow the federal government to marshal resources to counteract the street drug combination found in most states.” This marks “the first time the United States has declared a drug such a threat, a category enabled by a 2018 federal bill, said” Office of National Drug Control Policy Director Rahul Gupta, MD, MPH, FACP, MBA. Gupta “said his office is seeking $11 million to help create a strategy to stop its spread, develop an antidote and research how it has gotten into the drug supply, according to the Associated Press.”

The Hill (4/12, Weixel) reports the drug “Xylazine, also known as ‘tranq,’ is an easily accessible veterinary drug approved for use in animals as a sedative and pain reliever.” However, “it is also being used by drug dealers as a low-cost cutting agent in drugs like fentanyl as a way to extend a user’s high.”

CNN (4/11, McPhillips) reports, “More than 2.5 million cases of sexually transmitted infections were reported in 2021, jumping by 7% in one year, according to new data from the” CDC. The data indicated that “chlamydia accounted for more than half of the reported cases, with rates increasing about 4% in 2021,” while “cases of gonorrhea rose nearly 5%.” CNN adds, “Cases of syphilis surged 32% in one year, including an alarming rise in infections passed from pregnant mothers to babies developing in the womb.”

The Hill (4/11, Weixel) reports, “According to CDC, the 2021 data show STIs continue to disproportionately affect gay and bisexual men and younger people.”

The AP (4/11, Perrone) reports, “To try to turn the tide, many doctors see promise in doxycycline, a cheap antibiotic that has been sold for more than 50 years.” The CDC “is drafting recommendations for using it as a kind of morning-after pill for preventing STDs, said Dr. Leandro Mena, director of the agency’s STD prevention division.”

The New York Times (4/10, Ghorayshi) reports, “In 2012, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that boys were 4.7 times as likely as girls to receive an autism diagnosis,” but “by 2018, the ratio had dipped to 4.2 to 1.” A March 24 analysis published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report that was “based on the health and education records of more than 226,000 eight-year-olds across the” U.S. revealed that “the figure was 3.8 to 1.” In other words, “the autism rate in girls surpassed 1%, the highest ever recorded.”

HealthIT Security (4/7, Rodriguez) reported, “Hacktivist group KillNet has quickly evolved into a significant threat to the health care sector by executing distributed denial-of-service attacks,” according to an analyst note (PDF) released by the HHS Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center. The note said the group’s “signature DDoS attacks” generally “cause service outages lasting several hours or even days,” and “the range of consequences from these attacks” on the U.S. health sector “can be significant, threatening routine to critical day-to-day operations.”

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