Good morning, and happy Wednesday. Today’s newsletter top comes to you from the deep reporting of our colleague Akilah Johnson, who covers the way racism and social inequality affect health for The Post. Let’s dive in.
Long-covid patients of color are tired of being sick and neglected
While the coronavirus wreaked havoc on communities of color, data has suggested that the misery of long covid is more equally visited upon various communities. But public health experts and clinicians caution that those numbers almost certainly don’t tell the full story.
“The number one risk factor for long covid is covid, so the idea that long covid is affecting people equally, there’s no way,” Kanecia Zimmerman, an internist and pediatrician who is helping oversee the federal government’s study into the condition, said in an interview with The Post.
The data, Zimmerman and others warn, may say as much about who is believed by their provider, who can doctor-shop until they are taken seriously and who has the language to describe their symptoms to medical personnel.
Health-care experts and medical studies have found that racist myths about Black people having higher pain tolerance, coupled with physicians’ biases, mean Black patients are more likely to be seen as drug seeking and described negatively in electronic medical records.
A 2023 study showed that more than 65 million people worldwide — at least 15 million of them working-age Americans — had endured long covid. Most were 36 to 50 years old, and most experienced only mild covid cases that didn’t require hospitalization.
Last week, a diverse coalition of long-covid patient-activists appeared before a Senate hearing on the budget for the National Institutes of Health, demanding at least $1.2 billion in funding for long covid research and treatment.
In addition to Black patients, people from other communities of color have stories to tell. Latinos must confront stereotypes that conflate ethnic identity with immigration status and make assumptions about language ability.
That is true when it comes to routine diagnoses, and clinicians and public health researchers say the same happens with long covid, even as its definition remains a work in progress. A Chicana long-covid sufferer who speaks in unaccented English recalled in an interview with The Post being asked by a nurse if she needed an interpreter and being scolded for trying to get help.
“They were going to the doctor and sometimes weren’t being taken seriously,” said Linda Sprague Martinez, a professor and health equity researcher who has studied the impact of long covid on Black and Latino communities in Massachusetts. She added that some people were told to get on with their lives but not given help to do so.
“You need a doctor who believes you, who thinks you’re not just being lazy,” said Sprague Martinez, who now runs the Health Disparities Institute at UConn Health in Connecticut.
You can read Akilah’s full story here.
State scan
Fentanyl users get free smoking gear in some cities. Now there’s pushback.
Communities across the country are resisting the distribution of “safe smoking” supplies, with critics arguing that the harm-reduction tactic promoted by some public health officials encourages substance abuse and could make fentanyl more appealing to new users, our colleague David Ovalle reports in a deep dive out this morning.
Snapshot: In West Virginia, a law set to take effect Sunday will make it illegal for state-authorized syringe exchange groups to give away pipes, tin foil and other supplies used to consume illicit drugs — even as researchers report an increase in smoking among illicit drug users nationwide.
In Idaho, police raided a Boise harm-reduction organization in February on suspicion of distributing drug paraphernalia. In Oregon, the county health department in Portland scrapped a pilot program to hand out smoking supplies last summer amid criticism. In New York City, vending machines stocked with pipes and the overdose reversal medication naloxone prompted conservative media headlines about free “crack pipes.”
A closer look at the strategy: Some public health advocates and drug users say smoking fentanyl may lessen chances of a fatal overdose compared with injecting the drug. They also argue that providing safe smoking supplies could limit infected wounds and the spread of diseases associated with injecting, such as HIV and hepatitis C.
The pushback underscores long-standing tensions over strategies aimed at reducing the harmful effects of illicit drugs as the nation grapples with an overdose death toll that has topped 100,000 for three straight years.
Agency alert
FDA outlines new platform technology program
The Food and Drug Administration released highly anticipated draft guidance yesterday detailing how it plans to implement its new platform technology designation program.
Why it matters: The initiative, mandated by Congress, aims to accelerate the development, manufacturing and review of new drugs and biologics that utilize “well understood and reproducible technology,” such as certain nucleic acid sequences or molecular structures.
The draft guidance outlines eligibility criteria for receiving a platform technology designation and provides recommendations for what sponsors should include in their applications to the agency. It details the potential benefits of participating in the program, including the ability to leverage data from a prior product that used the designated platform technology and receiving timely advice from the FDA during the drug development process.
- The FDA will issue a determination within 90 days of receiving a platform technology designation request. The agency expects to receive approximately 10 applications per year, according to a Federal Register notice.
In other health news
- The Government Accountability Office is urging the Department of Veterans Affairs to collect and better assess data on veterans that use the agency’s mileage reimbursement benefit to offset the costs of traveling for medical care.
- A new review by the federal health department’s inspector general found that NIH-funded clinical trials often fall short in registering underrepresented groups and meeting the agency’s requirements for inclusion enrollment plans.
- The authors of the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination are considering whether to evaluate doctors’ understanding of artificial intelligence, as health systems are likely to expect new providers to use the technology as part of their patient-care training, Politico’s Daniel Payne reports.
Health reads
Cancer is capsizing Americans’ finances. ‘I was losing everything.’ (By Brianna Abbott and Peter Loftus | The Wall Street Journal)
Sugar rush
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