Top news stories from AMA Morning Rounds®: Week of Dec. 2, 2024

Read AMA Morning Rounds®’ most popular stories in medicine and public health from the week of Dec. 2, 2024–Dec. 5, 2024.

The Washington Post (11/27, Malhi) reported, “As the holiday season approaches, public health experts are sounding the alarm about low vaccination rates against the coronavirus, flu and RSV.” With travel and gatherings “on the rise, many people are heading into the next few months unprotected against these respiratory illnesses, which typically peak from December to February.” Experts are concerned “that the unenthusiastic embrace of vaccines could spark outbreaks and increased hospitalizations.” As of November, “about 37% of adults 18 and older had received a seasonal flu shot, while 19% had received updated coronavirus vaccines and 40% of adults 75 and older—the group at greatest risk—got an RSV vaccine.”

KFF Health News (12/2, Newsome) reports North Carolina’s state employee health plan stopped covering glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) agonist medications for weight loss due to costs, “but in a twist this August, a separate part of North Carolina’s government allowed the Medicaid program to start covering the drugs for weight loss—not just diabetes—for the state’s poorest residents, who are disproportionately affected by obesity and related diseases.” The switch in coverage “highlights concerns about the cost of these medications and ongoing questions about who should get to have such drugs covered by insurance.” Meanwhile, “the outgoing Biden administration wants to follow suit, proposing on Nov. 26 for the federal government to cover the medications to treat obesity or Medicaid patients nationwide, in addition to Medicare patients.”

The AP (12/3, Murphy) reports, “Nearly three out of 10 U.S. drugstores that were open during the previous decade had closed by 2021, new research shows.” The AP adds, “Black and Latino neighborhoods were most vulnerable to the retail pharmacy closures, which can chip away at already-limited care options in those communities, researchers said in a study.” In addition, “the trend has potentially gained momentum since the study’s timeframe, because many drugstores are still struggling.” The study was published in Health Affairs.

NBC News (12/4, Chuck) reports, “Exposure to lead in gasoline during childhood resulted in many millions of excess cases of psychiatric disorders over the last 75 years, a new study estimates.” The study looked at the “lasting impact” of lead in automobile fuel “in the U.S. by analyzing childhood blood lead levels from 1940 to 2015.” According to the findings, published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, “the national population experienced an estimated 151 million excess mental health disorders attributable to exposure to lead from car exhaust during children’s early development.”

The Washington Post (12/5, Johnson) says researchers “are reporting that it would take just a single mutation in the version of bird flu that has swept through U.S. dairy herds to produce a virus adept at latching on to human cells, a much simpler step than previously imagined.” The mutation investigators “identified would allow the virus to attach to our cells by hitching itself to a protein on their surface, known as the receptor.” The findings were published in Science.

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