Strict, Independent Oversight Crucial As Scientists Start To Explore Gene-Editing In Babies, NIH Director Says

The Washington Post: CRISPR Babies Spur NIH Director To Call For Public Debate, New Oversight
Last month’s news that Chinese scientist He Jiankui had gone rogue and conducted an (as-yet-unverified) experiment to modify the genes of two twin girls to make them resistant to HIV has left the scientific world scrambling to discourage creation of other genetically edited babies. The World Health Organization’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, acknowledged that we had jumped into “uncharted waters” and announced the formation of an expert panel to set guidelines and standards. The Chinese government has condemned He’s work and vowed serious consequences to discourage others from pursuing similar lines of research, but it has not offered any specifics. (Cha, 12/20)

Los Angeles Times: Voters Have High Tolerance For Politicians Who Lie, Even Those Caught Doing It
In a modern democracy, peddling conspiracies for political advantage is perhaps not so different from seeding an epidemic. If a virus is to gain a foothold with the electorate, it will need a population of likely believers (“susceptibles” in public-health speak), a germ nimble enough to infect new hosts easily (an irresistible tall tale), and an eager “Amen choir” (also known as “super-spreaders”). Unleashed on the body politic, a falsehood may spread across the social networks that supply us with information. Facebook is a doorknob slathered in germs, Twitter a sneezing coworker, and Instagram a child returning home after a day at school, ensuring the exposure of all. (Healy, 12/20)

Stat: After Sarepta, Going After The Genetic Causes Of Epilepsies At Stoke
When Dr. Ed Kaye was the CEO of Sarepta Therapeutics, he steered the company through a controversial approval process for its drug to treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy. ...Now he runs Stoke Therapeutics, a startup working on medicines for severe genetic diseases. Its goal is to develop drugs that target RNA splicing — the editing of RNA “messages” copied from our genes — so that more proteins are made in diseases where they are missing or diminished. Kaye talked with STAT recently about both Stoke and lessons learned from Sarepta. (Garde, Robbins and Feuerstein, 12/21)

The Washington Post: 452 Children Died On The Job In The U.S. From 2003 To 2016
Child labor exists in the United States in the 21st century. It's legal and widespread, and it’s also, in some cases, dangerous. Children were killed on the job in construction, retail, transportation and even manufacturing and logging. But most of them, 52%, died working in agriculture. (Van Dam, 12/20)

Kaiser Health News: ‘Don’t Wash That Bird!’ And Other (Often Unheeded) Food Safety Advice 
Rinsing chicken or turkey before cooking it is an ingrained step for many home cooks — passed down through generations and reinforced by cookbooks. Recipes like the “Perfect Roast Chicken” in 1999’s “The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook” advise cooks to “Rinse the chicken inside and out.” But that doesn’t reflect the science. To wash or not to wash? That’s a question home cooks ask experts at the USDA Meat and Poultry hotline a lot around the holidays. (Zuraw, 12/21)

NPR: Specialized Cells In Eye Linked To Mood Regions In Brain
Just in time for the winter solstice, scientists may have figured out how short days can lead to dark moods. Two recent studies suggest the culprit is a brain circuit that connects special light-sensing cells in the retina with brain areas that affect whether you are happy or sad. When these cells detect shorter days, they appear to use this pathway to send signals to the brain that can make a person feel glum or even depressed. (Hamilton, 12/21)

CNN: What Your Nightmares Could Reveal About Your Health
What's your most frequent nightmare? Is it dreaming that you're dying, or that one of your loved ones is suffering but you can't do anything about it? Or maybe you're waking up with confusion and a racing heart, simply glad that the dream ended. Nightmares are classified as dream sequences that seem realistic and often awaken the person. They are a complex experience. Though fear is the dominant emotion felt during nightmares, a 2014 study reported that sadness, anger, confusion, disgust, frustration or guilt were also common. (Avramova, 12/20)

The Wall Street Journal: Food Companies Get Until 2022 To Label GMOs
U.S. food companies must label products containing genetically engineered ingredients by 2022, federal regulators said, a victory for manufacturers who pushed for more time before disclosing use of the controversial crops. The new rules for labeling “bioengineered foods” also allow companies to skip labeling some ingredients, including refined sugars and corn syrups that often are made from genetically modified crops. That decision, outlined Thursday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is a win for food makers that argued traces of genetic material from modified crops in those ingredients are eliminated during processing. (Bunge, 12/20)

The Washington Post: Deadly Marburg Virus Found In Bats In Sierra Leone
Scientists have discovered the deadly Marburg virus in fruit bats in Sierra Leone, the first time this cousin of Ebola has been found in West Africa. There have been no reported cases of people or animals with active infections. But the pathogen’s presence in the bats raises the potential for it to infect humans in a new region more than a thousand miles from previously known outbreaks. There have been a dozen known Marburg virus outbreaks in other parts of Africa, most recently in Uganda in 2017. Like Ebola, Marburg virus initially infects people through contact with wild animals. It can then spread person to person through contact with bodily fluids. It kills up to 9 in 10 of its victims, sometimes within a week. (Sun, 12/20)

California Healthline: No-Go On Drunken Driving: States Deploy Breathalyzers In Cars To Limit Road Deaths
’Tis the season to be a little too merry, and law enforcement officials across the country are once again reminding revelers not to drive if they’ve been drinking. Along with those warnings comes a bit of good news: Deaths involving drunken driving are only about half of what they were in the early 1980s, though they have ticked back up in recent years. The long-term decline is largely attributable to greater public awareness, stricter seat belt enforcement and the establishment in 2000 of a national blood-alcohol threshold of 0.08 percent — far below the 0.15 percent standard commonly used before then. (Ibarra, 12/21)

Chicago Tribune: Tummy Tuck For The Holidays? Many Try To Squeeze In Elective Surgeries At Year's End
Each year, elective surgeries spike around the holidays in Chicago and across the nation. Many patients wait to schedule surgeries until after they’ve hit their health insurance deductibles toward the end of the year so they don’t have to pay as much out of pocket for procedures. It’s a trend that shows no signs of slowing, especially as an increasing number of people enroll in high-deductible insurance plans. Last year, more than 43 percent of adults ages 18 to 64 who get health insurance through their employers were enrolled in plans with deductibles of at least $1,300 per individual or $2,600 per family, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That was up from about 15 percent of adults enrolled in similar plans in 2007. (Schencker, 12/20)

Reuters: As Ebola Threatens Mega-Cities, Vaccine Stockpile Needs Grow
Doubts are growing about whether the world’s emergency stockpile of 300,000 Ebola vaccine doses is enough to control future epidemics as the deadly disease moves out of rural forest areas and into urban mega-cities. Outbreak response experts at the World Health Organization (WHO) and at the vaccines alliance GAVI are already talking to the leading Ebola vaccine manufacturer, Merck, to reassess just how much larger global stocks need to be. (12/20)

MPR: Young Adults Have A Hard Time Controlling Their Diabetes
It's a struggle to live with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, and according to a recent study by the Minnesota Department of Health, young adults in Minnesota may struggle the most when it comes to keeping their blood sugar at healthy levels. Their lives are sometimes transient, their access to health care is limited, and their income is inconsistent. (Davis and Lillie, 12/20)

MPR: African-Americans Struggle To Find Kidney Donors
According to the National Kidney Association, they're more likely to have high blood pressure and diabetes, both diseases that can lead to kidney failure. But on top of that, they're also less likely to be able to find a viable match for a kidney donation. (David and Lillie, 12/20)