Federal Judge Protects Healthcare for Transgender Children in Texas
In this issue - a stay on a cruel Texas anti-trans policy, an study on an effective cancer drug, and debunking misinformation about monkeypox
Judge Blocks Texas Investigations into Gender-Affirming Care, For Now
On Friday 6/10, an Austin judge temporarily stopped the state from investigating parents who had provided gender-affirming care to their transgender children. In February, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the Department of Family and Protective Services to begin investigating parents who have provided gender-affirming care to their children as perpetrators of child abuse. The temporary order by the judge is the result of a lawsuit filed Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Texas’ policy targets all forms of gender-affirming care, which includes counseling, reversible puberty blockers, and hormone therapy. Permanent treatments, including surgery, are rarely provided to people under 18. Multiple studies have shown positive outcomes for youth who receive gender-affirming care, including greatly reduced rates of suicide and depression. As a result, all major medical associations recommend the use of gender-affirming care to treat gender dysphoria.
Proposed legislation to criminalize the treatment of transgender children is problematic for a number of reasons. Targeting transgender people as a group and excluding them from receiving healthcare is inherently discriminatory, making it unconstitutional under most interpretations of the Constitution. But even if the constitutionality of these laws and policies was not an issue, they would still represent a dangerous infringement of legislation on medical practice. By implementing anti-trans laws, these lawmakers ignore the recommendations of prominent medical associations and instead direct patient care based on their own personal beliefs and without any understanding of medicine.
The expected negative outcomes of these types of laws have already been seen. In Texas, a 16-year-old transgender boy attempted to kill himself after Abbott’s new directive. After the boy was admitted to an outpatient psychiatric facility, the staff reported his family to the Department of Family and Protective Services for child abuse. The family would still be under investigation were it not for Friday’s stay on the policy.
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A Cancer Drug Trial That Treated All Patients
In a small clinical study at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, all patients treated with a drug for rectal cancer responded to the treatment and went into remission. This is a huge find since no other cancer drug in the past has been able to reach such a high level of efficacy.
In this trial, there were 18 patients that had received no prior treatment. They all had rectal cancer with the same mutation which is called the mismatch repair deficiency (MMR). This mutation is found in about 10% of cases of rectal cancer and in some other forms of cancer too. To treat the cancer, the researchers gave the patients an immunotherapy drug called dostarlimab (JEMPERLI). This drug basically tags cancer cells so that the immune system can detect them. This receptor is called PD-1 and it is a receptor that tells immune cells not to attack a cell. In the MMR mutation, cancer cells overexpress PD-1 and JEMPERLI inhibits it allowing the immune cells to see the cancerous cell and kill it.
This study is now in its second year and is going to go until five years to confirm that the patients are in complete remission. In the study, none of the patients had serious side effects which marks a great improvement over current cancer therapies like chemotherapy and radiotherapy. However, the drug only works with MMR mutations so the use of it is somewhat limited to only some types of cancers and only in some cases.
Overall, this is great news for the oncology field. While it is still too soon to say with certainty that the patients have been cured of cancer, it is still a huge step forward in the right direction. To further validate this treatment for the masses, the next step would be to conduct a larger scale clinical trial.
Featured Fake News
“That the CDC is telling people to wear masks to stop the spread of monkeypox, when monkeypox ISN’T EVEN AIRBORNE just shows you how much the people who “follow the science” actually follow the science.
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=133075166051546&id=116632067695856
The author of this Facebook post claims that the CDC telling people that wearing masks could stop the spread of monkeypox is evidence of the CDC’s incompetence because monkeypox is not “airborne”.
While the virus can be transmitted through close contact during sex, it can also be spread by touching material used by an infected person, their coughs and sneezes, or other skin to skin contact (here).
Reuters interviewed Dr. Hugh Adler of the Respiratory Infections Group in Liverpool, who said there is “no reason to suspect it can become airborne or linger in the air”. Adler explained that respiratory droplet transmission differs greatly to aerosol or airborne transmission. The virus probably transmits via large respiratory droplets, but it is likely that direct close contact is a more important way of transmission.
The CDC removed a mask recommendation from its monkeypox travel notice on June 6 to avoid “confusion” over the disease. It’s not that the CDC’s original recommendation was inaccurate or unscientific, but that its messaging was confusing people over how prevalent monkeypox is and how it mostly spreads. The CDC continues to recommend masking for those in close proximity to or contact with monkeypox.
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