Facebook’s health headaches, young blood’s bad day, & residents' reality TV turn

First up today, I want to brief you on the latest chapter of the crisis engulfing Facebook. After last year’s scandals involving Cambridge Analytica and Russian trolls, this time the controversies concern anti-vaccine information and health privacy.

It all started last week when journalists reported that Facebook allows advertisers to target users who have demonstrated interest in anti-vaccine information — and that anti-vaccine ads promoted on the site have been viewed millions of times. Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California also sent a letter to the company urging it to stem the flow of vaccine misinformation.

For Facebook’s part, a spokesperson told me that the company has “taken steps to reduce the distribution of health-related misinformation on Facebook, but we know we have more to do.” Facebook also told Bloomberg that it’s considering demoting such content in search results and blocking it from being recommended to users.

If that wasn’t enough, Facebook found itself in another health-related mess this week, concerning support groups on its site where users convene to discuss their own medical conditions. A complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission last month and made public yesterday accuses Facebook of improperly disclosing information about its users who joined these groups with the expectation of privacy. Facebook took heat on this one, too, from federal lawmakers who want the company to brief them on the matter by the end of this month.

When I asked Facebook about this, a spokesperson said that the site isn’t fundamentally about anonymity and makes clear to users what information is visible to other members of a given group.

Taken together, Facebook’s raging health-related headaches highlight the deep sense of distrust with which many people now regard the site. The only surprise, to me, is that it’s taken this long for Facebook’s troubles to manifest in the realm of health.

Now, onto the latest headlines

Speaking of anti-vaccine information: The Pacific Northwest is dealing with a worrisome measles outbreak — and state legislators are trying to take action. In Washington state, a House committee advanced a bill that would ban the philosophical exemption under which parents can currently decline to vaccinate their school-age children against measles, mumps, and rubella. In Oregon, a state lawmaker says he’s preparing a bill that would go even further, removing both the philosophical and religious exemptions.

Silicon Valley is often thought as the epicenter of the craze around young blood — a reputation cemented by a 2017 episode of a certain HBO show. So plenty of jokes were made yesterday when the FDA rebuked the promotion of infusions of plasma from young donors, with a warning that the procedure provides “no proven clinical benefit” for aging or diseases like Alzheimer’s. In response, the most well-known startup in the field, Bay Area-based Ambrosia, said on its website that it had “ceased patient treatments” in compliance with the agency’s statement.

In the latest CRISPR advance, scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego edited the genomes of some newborn mice carrying the mutation associated with progeria, a rare genetic disorder that causes accelerated aging and early death. Compared to untreated mice, treated mice lived longer, and their cardiovascular and musculoskeletal systems functioned better, but they still fared worse than normal mice, my STAT colleague Sharon Begley reports.

You may have heard that the California-based health system Kaiser Permanente is planning to open a new medical school in the Los Angeles area next year. Yesterday, Kaiser said that tuition will be waivedfor the school’s first five graduating classes. The strategy is aimed at encouraging young doctors to have the financial freedom to pursue less lucrative specialities like family medicine — but it could also be a useful recruitment tool for the new school to compete with other medical schools for the best applicants.

MIT Technology Review is out with a smart profile of NextGen Jane, an Oakland-based startup that’s trying to use women’s menstrual blood to try to diagnose endometriosis. The company’s story offers “a case study in how a woman’s health is typically viewed through the lens of her ability to bear children — and how that ingrained bias slows innovation in medicine,” reporter Dayna Evans writes.

The word “meat” is increasingly fraught these days, as beef and farm industry groups back state-level legislation challenging the use of the term to refer to plant-based burgers produced by California-based startups like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. In a great storydocumenting the trend, the New York Times interviewed lawmakers who’ve introduced bills cracking down on the new products, including a longtime vegan from Nebraska whose last name is Blood.

When I’m not writing this newsletter, I’m often recording STAT’s weekly biotech podcast, which you always can find here or wherever you get your podcasts. In the latest episode of "The Readout LOUD," my co-hosts and I interviewed Dr. Eric Topol, the cardiologist and geneticist at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, about his literature search for gold-standard research into artificial intelligence in medicine. (Spoiler: He didn’t find much.)

Watch this video

Dr. Priscilla Chan, the pediatrician married to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, gave a rare interview to the show "CBS This Morning." Among other topics, she talks about her work at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the couple’s absurdly ambitious philanthropic operation. At one point in the interview, when asked if she’s really aspiring to eliminate all disease by the end of the century, Chan smiles confidently and says: “Yeah.”

If you know someone angling to get into reality TV

A new reality TV show is looking to cast surgical residents specializing in surgery in — where else? — the Los Angeles area. The planned show is called “Making the Cut,” according to a notice in the usually staid online pages of the trade publication General Surgery News. As you might guess, the discussion on Twitter focused on the question of “what could go wrong.”