Top news stories from AMA Morning Rounds®: Week of Aug. 21, 2023

Read AMA Morning Rounds®’ most popular stories in medicine and public health from the week of Aug. 21, 2023–Aug. 25, 2023.

The Hill (8/24, Choi) reports, “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Thursday announced the launch of a new initiative aimed at supporting sepsis teams at U.S. hospitals in light of new data that found a third of patients who die in hospitals had sepsis while hospitalized.” The program, Hospital Sepsis Program Core Elements, “will act as a ‘manager’s guide’ on how to organize staff and identify resources needed for bringing sepsis rates down, the agency said.” The article adds, “The initiative listed seven elements of a strong sepsis program: leadership commitment, accountability, multi-professional expertise, action, tracking, reporting, and education.”

The New York Times (8/24, Baumgaertner) reports the CDC’s “road map, a 35-page document outlining the ‘core elements’ of a hospital sepsis program, is meant to help administrators bring together experts from various medical disciplines to detect and treat sepsis faster.” Every year, “about 1.7 million adults in the United State develop sepsis and about 350,000 of them die or are moved to hospice.”

Reuters (8/23, Jain) reports, “The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Wednesday the new BA.2.86 lineage of coronavirus may be more capable than older variants in causing infection in people who have previously had COVID-19 or who have received vaccines.” However, the agency “said it was too soon to know whether this might cause more severe illness compared with previous variants.” It also “said on Wednesday the current increase in hospitalizations in the United States is not likely driven by the BA.2.86 lineage.”

The Hill (8/23, Choi) reports, “So far only two cases from BA.2.86 have been confirmed in the U.S.” In a statement, the CDC said, “The large number of mutations in this variant raises concerns of greater escape from existing immunity from vaccines and previous infections compared with other recent variants.”

The New York Times (8/22, Mandavilli) reports the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force “has given its highest recommendation to an expanded menu of H.I.V. prevention strategies for adults and adolescents, a move that will require private insurers to cover the drugs without a co-pay or deductible under the Affordable Care Act.” The news comes “as the...administration is fighting to preserve no-cost coverage of all preventive services under the A.C.A., after a Texas judge ruled the mandate to be unconstitutional.” The panel’s new recommendations were “published on Tuesday in JAMA,” giving a “‘grade A’ recommendation to three medications approved for PrEP.”

The Hill (8/22, Choi) reports, “The new recommendations for preexposure prophylaxis, commonly known as PrEP, are consistent with what was issued by the USPSTF in 2019, with the only difference being the consideration of the injectable form of the drug cabotegravir—known commercially as Apretude.”

Reuters (8/21, Wingrove, Satija) reports, “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved Pfizer’s respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine for use in women during the middle of the third trimester of pregnancy to protect their babies.” The go-ahead “allows the vaccine to be given to women 32 to 36 weeks into a pregnancy to prevent lower respiratory tract infection and severe disease in infants until they are six months old, the company said.” The move comes after an FDA expert panel “backed the safety and effectiveness of Pfizer’s RSV vaccine for women in their second and third trimesters earlier in May.”

Reuters (8/18, Beasley) reported the “U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday that it was tracking a new, highly mutated lineage of the virus that causes COVID-19.” The strain “is named BA.2.86, and has been detected in the United States, Denmark and Israel, the CDC said in a post on messaging platform X.” On Thursday, the WHO also “said in a post on X that it had classified BA.2.86 as a ‘variant under monitoring’ due to the large number of mutations it carries.”

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