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EVERYTHING
Trump Administration Launches Mass Layoffs at CDC, FDA, HHS
What: Mass layoffs happened throughout the federal health agencies today, including several entire offices within the CDC and FDA. Some internal agencies that closed focused on older adults, people with disabilities, minority health, gun violence, sexual assault, and HIV. Another notable loss is the FDA’s top tobacco regulator, Brian King, which ignited concerns about the enforcement of tobacco regulations and efforts to prevent smoking-related issues.
Key Line: “Robert Califf, a former FDA commissioner during the Obama administration, said Tuesday in a post on LinkedIn that the agency ‘as we’ve known it is finished,’ and he predicted the loss of institutional knowledge would be ‘a huge mistake.'”
Source: USA TODAY
Willow Acquires Elvie Assets in Women’s Health Consolidation
What: Breast pump startup Willow is taking over assets of Elvie, which is facing insolvency in the UK. Willow said they aim to build a wider platform, paving the way for eventual profitability.
Key Line: “Elvie’s tip into bankruptcy speaks to some of the wider challenges in the world of women’s health, which is estimated to be a $60 billion market this year but has faced a number of headwinds. The market since 2021 has continued to be challenging for later-stage startups, especially those that are not focused almost solely on AI. There are not a lot of exit opportunities for women’s health businesses at the moment.”
Source: TechCrunch
PREGNANCY + POSTPARTUM
Exploring the Ethics of Polygenic Embryo Screening
What: This is part two of three in the New York Times’ deep dive into IVF, this time focusing on the rise of polygenic embryo screening. It’s a technology used to assess the genetic risks and traits of embryos, and the piece looks at the ethics and potential consequences of picking embryos based on probabilities driven by genetic factors.
Key Line: “The usefulness of polygenic risk scoring in adults is still an open question; its application to embryos is even less straightforward. Because the results are probabilistic, having a slightly elevated risk of a condition does not necessarily translate into developing it. The risk calculus is further complicated by the vastly different environment for a child born today compared with the adults whose biological samples, the large-scale collection of which began in the mid-2000s, make up the data sets from which these risk scores are generated.”
Source: The New York Times
ABORTION ACCESS
Trump Admin Cuts Funding for Reproductive Healthcare
What: The Trump administration sent letters freezing $35 million in federal Title X funding, cutting off access to birth control and cancer screenings in 20 states. This move follows a pattern of jeopardizing reproductive healthcare through policies like redirecting funding to unreliable fertility-based methods and targeting essential clinics for serving marginalized communities.
Key Line: “’We know what happens when health care providers cannot use Title X funding: People across the country suffer, cancers go undetected, access to birth control is severely reduced, and the nation’s STI crisis worsens,’ said [Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Action Fund.]“
Source: Ms. Magazine
CARDIOVASCULAR
Heart Disease Outcomes Gap Has (Recently) Narrowed
What: A study from Intermountain Health found that while heart-related death rates for women are still high, the gender gap is decreasing. Researchers looked at records of over 14,000 women and 26,000 men who had a coronary angiography between 2000 and 2019. When broken into five-year periods they saw the differences between men and women having major cardiac events narrowed, with no significant differences by sex from 2015 to 2019.
Key Line: “’The reality is that women are different from men and need to be evaluated, diagnosed, and treated differently for heart disease,’ said Kismet Rasmusson, NP, principal investigator of the study and a cardiovascular nurse practitioner in Intermountain Health’s Advanced Heart Failure Program. ‘While these findings show that we’ve made progress with the care of women in our local area, we still have a long way to go…'”
Source: Intermountain Health
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