Female speakers only, surprise hospital bills, & fatty liver disease

First up, I want to brief you on an odd story I’ve been watching unfold over the past few days. It features an unlikely collision of microbiome science and the culture wars.

It all started when the organizers of a new microbiome conferencedecided to invite only female speakers to present at their meeting, which kicks off this morning at the University of California, San Diego. The conference’s website initially said the goal was to “demonstrate that it is possible to have a large representation of women presenters in a scientific meeting by inviting only women speakers.”

That caught the attention of a Wall Street Journal editorial writer, who in an opinion piece titled “No Men Allowed” argued that the conference may be violating the university’s standards about discrimination against certain groups. The American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, picked up the story, too.

Soon, the language about the conference’s goal was gone from its website. Asked why, a UCSD spokesperson told me it was “updated to eliminate any confusion with regard to objectives.”

In a phone interview with me last week before the meeting attracted criticism, the conference’s co-organizer, Sandrine Miller-Montgomery, left little confusion about what she and her team were trying to do.

“We are not the Amazons. We are not wanting to control the world. We just wanted to show it is possible to have 100 percent women speakers,” she told me. The idea, she said, was to shoot down the argument she often hears put forward in defense of male-only panels or mostly male conferences — that it’s too difficult to find enough women speakers to achieve gender parity on stage.

And, for the record, men are allowed, she said. Men represent about 46 percent of the approximately 250 people who’d registered to attend the meeting as of last week.

Now, onto the latest headlines

Last week, I told you about Facebook’s flaring controversies in health and medicine. This week brought another one, concerning popular smartphone apps in which users record sensitive health data such as when they’re ovulating. The Wall Street Journal revealed that these apps are sharing that information with Facebook — even in cases in which the user has no connection to the social networking giant. WSJ’s report spurred several companies to stop sharing those data with Facebook, including Silicon Valley app makers Flo Health and Azumio.

There’s new data out from Virta Health, a San Francisco startup that uses digital coaching and monitoring to try to help patients reverse type 2 diabetes. The results concern nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, a form of the condition that’s less serious than NASH. In a company-sponsored study published this week, patients in Virta’s program who have both diabetes and NAFLD showed improvements in their liver fat scores. Fortune has more details.

You may be familiar with MannKind, the long-struggling Los Angeles area company that hemorrhages money and sells the inhaled insulin product Afrezza. But a turnaround could be on the horizon: The company just reported its best-ever quarterly sales of Afrezza and the product’s first-ever gross profit, my STAT colleague Adam Feuerstein reports.

Verily, Alphabet’s life sciences unit, put out a blog post touting its work with sister company Google in a hospital in India testing a machine learning tool to detect signs of eye conditions in diabetes patients that can cause blindness. I recommend reading the post alongside a recent piece from the Wall Street Journal documenting the challenges that the researchers in India are facing, such as with images of too low quality for the machine learning tool to generate a diagnosis.

The stories keep coming in about patients hit with huge surprise medical bills after a visit to Zuckerberg San Francisco General, a public hospital in San Francisco named after benefactor and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Now, California lawmakers are introducing legislation that would ban such bills, Vox reports.

As a measles outbreak sweeps the Pacific Northwest, lawmakers in Washington state and Oregon are pushing forward bills that would eliminate certain exemptions that allow parents to skip vaccinating their school-aged kids. Meanwhile, Arizona legislators are moving in the opposite direction: A legislative committee last week pushed forward three bills that are being criticized as anti-vaccine, including one that would make it easier to get vaccine exemptions and two others that would create new work for physicians administering vaccines.

For the latest episode of STAT’s biotech podcast, I sat down with Dr. Laura Esserman, a top breast cancer surgeon at UC San Francisco. We talked about a new recommendation that all breast cancer patients get genetic testing. And Laura sang a Broadway tune. You can always find new episodes of "The Readout LOUD" here or wherever you get your podcasts.

What do Juul and Grail have in common?

Juul, the controversial e-cigarette maker, and Grail, the liquid biopsy developer, are both based in the Bay Area. They’re both working on products with an impact, for better or for worse, on human health. And they’re also “minotaurs” — the name that Axios coined to refer to the club of venture-backed companies that have raised more than $1 billion in funding.

Theranos watch

Does the public have a limitless appetite for Theranos content? I sure do. Vanity Fair’s Nick Bilton last week came out with a detail-rich storychronicling CEO Elizabeth Holmes’ last months at the now-dissolved blood-testing company. Last night, Bilton published a follow-up piecethat included a remarkable anecdote from late last summer: In the company’s final days before it shut its doors for good, Holmes (at that point no longer CEO) was partying at Burning Man.