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Britain will conduct an independent review into whether medical devices used in the country have perpetuated racial and gender biases, the country’s health secretary said on Sunday, spurred by health disparities highlighted during the pandemic. “It is easy to look at a machine and assume that everyone’s getting the same experience,” wrote Sajid Javid in the Sunday Times. “But technologies are created and developed by people, and so bias, however inadvertent, can be an issue here too.” (Kwai, 11/21)

The British government is investigating whether built-in racial bias in some medical devices led to Black and Asian people getting sick and dying disproportionately from COVID-19. Health Secretary Sajid Javid said Sunday that the pandemic had highlighted health disparities along race and gender lines. He said that a third of intensive care admissions in Britain at the height of the pandemic were people from Black and ethnic minority backgrounds, more than double their share of the population. (Lawless, 11/21)

Britain called on Sunday for international action on the issue of medical devices such as oximeters that work better on people with lighter skin, saying the disparities may have cost lives of ethnic minority patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. Health Secretary Sajid Javid said he had commissioned a review of the issue after learning that oximeters, which measure blood oxygen levels and are key to assessing COVID patients, give less accurate readings for patients with darker skin. "This is systemic across the world. This is about a racial bias in some medical instruments. It's unintentional but it exists, and oximeters are a really good example of that," Javid said during an interview with the BBC. (11/21)

Pregnant women who become infected with the delta variant face a significantly higher risk of a stillbirth or dying during childbirth, new studies show. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report Friday that examined 1.2 million deliveries in 736 hospitals nationwide from March 2020 through September 2021. Stillbirths were rare overall, totaling 8,154 among all deliveries. But researchers found that for women with COVID-19, about one in 80 deliveries resulted in a stillbirth. Among the uninfected, the rate was one in 155. (11/21)

High-income countries have received disproportionately more COVID-19 vaccine doses than low- and middle-income countries, allowing them to vaccinate much more of their populations, finds a study yesterday in JAMA Network Open. Yale University researchers identified COVID-19 vaccines listed by the World Health Organization for emergency use and all vaccine trials completed by Sep 7, 2021. (11/19)

A modeling study today in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report estimates that 12,000 more people die 2 weeks after US hospitals reach 75% adult intensive care unit (ICU) occupancy amid COVID-19 pandemic surges, a figure that rises to 80,000 when ICUs are full—which is the case now in many hospitals in multiple US states. Researchers from the US Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency COVID Task Force evaluated the relationship between overwhelmed hospitals and excess deaths from Jul 4, 2020, to Jul 10, 2021. The end of the study period included the emergence and eventual dominance of the more transmissible Delta (B1617.2) variant. (Van Beusekom, 11/19)

In another surveillance study published yesterday in Eurosurveillance, European researchers reported a significant increase across the continent in Staphylococcus aureus bloodstream infections (BSIs), despite a decline in BSIs caused by methicillin-resistant S aureus (MRSA). The analysis of data from the European Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance Network (EARS-Net) for 2005 through 2018 found that, in the 25 EU/EEA countries that consistently reported data on S aureus BSIs, the proportion of BSIs caused by MRSA declined from 30.2% in 2005 to 16.3% in 2018. The percentage of MRSA BSIs declined across all age-groups. (11/19)

Late last year, gastroenterologist Dr. Michael Bass decided to try out a new program: an endoscopy that patients would complete at home, with his support, over telehealth. The COVID-19 crisis essentially shut down operations at the private practice Bass sees patients at, GI Specialist of Delaware, for some of 2020, as in-person procedures were canceled or deferred in the early days of the pandemic. Even since then, patients have been hesitant to return to the office, Bass said. He needed a way to move as much care as possible out of the practice, and like many physicians, turned to telehealth. (Kim Cohen, 11/19)

A team of researchers has designed a wearable sensor that, in preliminary testing, identified infections in open wounds before they looked any different than uninfected wounds. Their sensor, which combines principles from biology, materials science, and electrical engineering, may one day be a low-cost, time-saving alternative to existing diagnostic tools. (Bender, 11/19)

The Food and Drug Administration approved the first treatment for the most common cause of dwarfism Friday, a drug that has proved to increase children’s height but has been polarizing among adults with short stature. The treatment, developed by BioMarin Pharmaceutical, is a once-daily injection for children with achondroplasia, a rare genetic disorder that results in dwarfism and can lead to serious medical complications. In a pivotal clinical trial, patients who got the drug, called Voxzogo, grew 1.6 centimeters more over the course of a year than those who received placebo. That means patients who take Voxzogo throughout childhood are likely to reach heights similar to their peers who don’t have achondroplasia, according to BioMarin. (Garde, 11/19)

Australian company Fertilis has developed a new petri dish for in-vitro fertilization (IVF) that it says reduces human error and boosts success rates. As couples increasingly delay childbearing to later in life, the need for effective assisted reproductive technologies like IVF is only expected to grow. (Walsh, 11/20)

Citing the rising threat posed by antimicrobial overuse to the food and agriculture sectors, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) today released a new 5-year action plan on antimicrobial resistance (AMR). With the world expected to produce as much food over the next 30 years as it has in the past 10,000, and antimicrobial use in livestock expected to double to keep up with demand, the FAO says now is the time to help countries strengthen their capacities to manage AMR risks in the food and agriculture sectors. Doing so will not only buy time for the discovery and development of new drugs, the agency argues, but also help build more sustainable, resilient food systems. (Dall, 11/19)