Top news stories from AMA Morning Rounds®: Week of April 1, 2024

Read AMA Morning Rounds®’ most popular stories in medicine and public health from the week of April 1, 2024–April 5, 2024.

Reuters (4/4, Hamaide) reports, “The spread of bird flu to an increasing number of species and its widening geographic reach have raised the risks of humans being infected by the virus, the head of the World Organization for Animal Health (WOAH) said on Thursday.” The comments from Monique Eloit “come after the U.S. government reported cases of the disease in dairy cows in several states and a person in Texas, which she said would only be a strong concern if there had been a transmission between cows, something the U.S. authorities are still investigating.” Although “some outbreaks of bird flu have caused serious or fatal infections among people who have close contact with wild birds or poultry...to date there has been no sustained human-to-human transmission observed.” And “for most people who are not exposed to infected animals, the risk of catching the disease is very low, scientists say.”

The Washington Post (4/3, Gilbert, Roubein) reports the FDA has greenlit a trial by Prenosis, testing the company’s AI tool “to predict the risk of sepsis—a complex condition that contributes to at least 350,000 deaths a year in the United States. It is the first algorithmic AI-driven diagnostic tool for sepsis to receive the FDA’s go-ahead, the company said in a statement Wednesday.” To test the tool, the company “acquired more than 100,000 blood samples along with clinical data on hospital patients, and trained its algorithm to recognize the health measures most associated with developing sepsis.” Now, the tool “produces a snapshot that classifies a patient’s risk of sepsis in four categories, from low to very high.”

The Hill (4/2, Choi) reports, “The number of mpox cases in 2024 is already nearly double the number of cases that were detected in all of 2023.” According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been “582 cases of mpox” in the U.S. in 2024 so far, while there were 299 cases in all of 2023. The highest concentration is in the Middle Atlantic region with 185 cases. In 2022, there were over 32,000 cases in the U.S. and 58 deaths.

The New York Times (4/1, Goldberg) reports HHS on Monday “said...hospitals must obtain written informed consent from patients before they undergo sensitive examinations—like pelvis and prostate exams—especially if the patients will be under anesthesia.” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, together with leading CMS officials, “sent a letter to the country’s teaching hospitals and medical schools denouncing the practice of doctors and students conducting the exams without explicit consent.”

Modern Healthcare says officials “wrote that hospitals should have comprehensive informed consent policies in place that comply with legal requirements and that state regulators are obligated to enforce those rules.”

STAT (4/1, Merelli, Subscription Publication) says medical examinations “of sensitive areas—such breast, pelvic, prostate, and rectal examinations—are an important part of medical training, but they can be incredibly invasive and traumatic,” and “in the absence of clear federal guidance, these exams have been regulated by individual state statutes.”

The Hill (3/29, O'Connell-Domenech) reported CDC data show that rates “of sexually transmitted diseases are skyrocketing among older Americans,” with some diseases seeing “a nearly eightfold increase since 2010.” Gonorrhea cases “have grown roughly sevenfold since 2010 among American adults older than 55, per the data,” and chlamydia rates “have more than quadrupled since 2010 among the same age group,” while “syphilis cases in 2022 were nearly eight times higher.” The Hill added, “Researchers think misconceptions about STDs among older Americans are contributing to the rise.”

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