From Washington, DC

• Welcome back Congress, the House of Representatives and the Senate will resume Committee business and floor voting tomorrow.

• The Wall Street Journal observes,
  • “Mike Johnson’s tightrope walk to remain House speaker starts this coming week.
  • “The Louisiana Republican needs to pass a short-term spending bill to keep the government funded, avoid sparking open GOP rebellion, keep the Republican majority in the November election and then get colleagues to line up behind him in January. It is a tall order even for Johnson, who defied expectations by navigating the House through a series of sticky intraparty battles after stepping into the role of speaker when Kevin McCarthy was ousted last year.
  • “Right now, I’m solely focused on finishing the legislative session strong and protecting and growing our majority,” Johnson said in an interview, adding that he was preparing a “very aggressive” first 100 days of the next Congress. “When time comes to run for speaker, I intend to run, and I expect that I’ll be leading again.”

From the public health and medical research front,

• STAT News reports,
  • “For years, Merck’s drug Keytruda has dominated cancer immunotherapy, racking up dozens of approvals, extending the lives of patients, and bringing in billions of dollars to the pharma giant. But detailed data presented by Summit Therapeutics on Sunday demonstrated that the company’s experimental therapy has done what no other has done before: beat Keytruda in a head-to-head late-stage trial in lung cancer.
  • “The Summit drug, an antibody called ivonescimab, reduced the risk of tumor progression by 49% compared to Keytruda, according to data released here at the World Conference on Lung Cancer. At the median, patients treated with ivonescimab went 11.1 months before their tumors began to grow again compared to 5.8 months for patients on Keytruda.”  * * *
  • “The Phase 3 study, called HARMONi-2, was conducted by Akeso, a Chinese company that invented ivonescimab and licensed it to Summit. Researchers enrolled nearly 400 patients with previously untreated, advanced non-small cell lung cancer. 
  • “Summit doesn’t plan to use the trial, conducted exclusively in China, to file for U.S. approval given the Food and Drug Administration’s wariness of such studies. But the biotech said in a press release Sunday that, based on the results, it plans to start a global trial early next year dubbed HARMONi-7 that will compare Keytruda and ivonescimab in patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer who have high levels of PD-L1.”

• The Washington Post seeks to explain “how bird flu spreads, milk and egg safety and more.”
  • “Each time there is highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreak, it triggers concerns that the virus could mutate to infect humans more readily and start spreading from person to person.
  • T”hat happened with swine flu in 2009, when pigs became simultaneously infected with avian influenza and human influenza. The two viruses exchanged their genetic material inside the pigs, allowing the bird flu to use the genetic blueprint from the human flu to spread among people.
  • “Such a pandemic cannot be predicted because this exchange of genetic material is a random event.
  • “If anything, the odds are against it,” Schaffner said, noting that bird flu strains are circulating all the time and do not pose a risk to humans. Although the strain has infected some mammals — including mink, causing an outbreak at a Spanish farm in October 2022 — “that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to pick up the capacity to spread to humans,” he said.

• The Washington Post also points out,
  • Only 61 percent of U.S. 13-to-17-year-olds have been fully vaccinated against the human papillomavirus (HPV), according to research published last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The finding was based on vaccination records of over 16,500 adolescents obtained via the 2023 National Immunization Survey-Teen. The goal was to determine rates for the four routine adolescent vaccines: for tetanus-diphtheria-pertussis (Tdap), meningitis (MenACWY), HPV and the flu.” * * *
  • “Since the HPV vaccine has been in use in the United States, HPV infections and cervical pre-cancers have significantly dropped, said Cassandra Pingali, the study’s lead author. In the 2023 vaccination survey, about 77 percent of adolescents had received at least one dose of the HPV vaccine, while only 61 percent had completed the vaccination series. Though HPV vaccination numbers steadily increased until 2022, coverage has stalled for the second consecutive year.
  • “Of the surveyed adolescent vaccinations, HPV lags behind other routine shots. Research from the American Academy of Pediatrics suggests that many parents of adolescents are hesitant to vaccinate because of a lack of knowledge, fears about safety or their child not being sexually active.”

• The New York Times asks us to
  • “welcome a new metric: the body roundness index. B.R.I. is just what it sounds like — a measure of how round or circlelike you are, using a formula that takes into account height and waist, but not weight.
  • “It’s a formula that may provide a better estimate of central obesity and abdominal fat, which are closely linked to an increased risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, hypertension and heart disease, unlike fat stored on the buttocks and thighs.
  • “A paper published in JAMA Network Open in June was the latest in a string of studies to report that B.R.I. is a promising predictor of mortality. B.R.I. scores generally run from 1 to 15; most people rank between 1 and 10. Among a nationally representative sample of 33,000 Americans, B.R.I. scores rose between 1999 and 2018, the new study found.
  • “Those with B.R.I. scores of 6.9 and up — indicating the roundest bodies — were at the highest risk of dying from cancer, heart disease and other illnesses.
  • “Their overall mortality risk was almost 50 percent greater than those with B.R.I.s of 4.5 to 5.5, which were in the midrange of the sample, while those with B.R.I. scores of 5.46 to 6.9 faced a risk that was 25 percent higher than those in the midrange.
  • “But those who were least round were also at elevated risk of death: People with B.R.I. scores under 3.41 also faced a mortality risk that was 25 percent higher than those in the midrange, the study found.
  • “The paper’s authors suggested the lower scores, seen mostly in those 65 and older, might have reflected malnutrition, muscle atrophy or inactivity.”