| | | | |  | | By Carmen Paun, Ben Leonard, Erin Schumaker and Ruth Reader | Presented by Guardant Health | | | | |  President Biden's administration is touting PEPFAR's successes, while also calling for a budget cut. | AP | As the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is touting PEPFAR’s accomplishments. But President Joe Biden’s budget proposal throws some shade on the parade. Biden wants to reduce PEPFAR funding in fiscal 2024 by $25 million compared with the amount enacted for this fiscal year, prompting one advocate, Chip Lyons, president and CEO of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, to charge that Biden was willing to “put the hard-won gains in the global HIV response at risk.” Specifically, Lyons said the funding would make it impossible to reach the United Nations goal of ending the public health threat posed by HIV and AIDS by 2030. The Biden budget proposal, though unlikely to be adopted by Congress, comes as lawmakers work on reauthorizing the program. The public health gains from PEPFAR are impressive, according to the CDC: — Approximately 20 million persons with HIV in 54 countries have received antiretroviral drugs, a 300-fold increase. — PEPFAR has saved an estimated 25 million lives. — Between 2015 and 2022, the percentage of people with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, who achieved viral load suppression where the virus is undetectable, increased from 80 to 95 percent. Next steps: HIV remains a health threat, and PEPFAR needs to focus on groups that haven’t achieved similar high rates of viral load suppression, the CDC said. Those groups include people who are pregnant or breastfeeding, inmates and people younger than 20, according to the report. “Stigma and discrimination remain important barriers to health equity,” the CDC said. More than 30 million people worldwide still live with HIV, and about 10 million of them hadn’t received antiretroviral therapy in 2021, according to the CDC.
| | | | A message from Guardant Health: 49M individuals remain unscreened and are at increased risk of dying from CRC. Learn more. | | | | | | | 
Hull, Mass. | Shawn Zeller | This is where we explore the ideas and innovators shaping health care. Researchers at Harvard say they have figured out how to make E. coli virus-resistant. That could make it easier to produce medicines made from bacteria like insulin. As it stands, viruses can infect bacteria like E. coli, causing production problems. Share any thoughts, news, tips and feedback with Ben Leonard at bleonard@politico.com, Ruth Reader at rreader@politico.com, Carmen Paun at cpaun@politico.com or Erin Schumaker at eschumaker@politico.com. Send tips securely through SecureDrop, Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp. Today on our Pulse Check podcast, your host Ben talks with Krista Mahr about the new CDC figures showing a sharp rise in U.S. maternal deaths, cementing America’s status as one of the most dangerous wealthy nations to live in if you're pregnant or giving birth.
| | | | | | | A message from Guardant Health:   | | | | | | |  Kids are experiencing high levels of anxiety and depression. | Getty Images | Kids’ mental health is the most pressing patient-safety concern for 2023, warns nonprofit ECRI in its annual report. The safety-focused group pointed to an HHS study finding that anxiety and depression among kids ages 3 to 17 jumped close to 30 percent between 2016 and 2020. Marcus Schabacker, ECRI’s president, told Ben that the rise of social media, a dearth of pediatric behavioral health providers and gun violence have all exacerbated the problem. And then the pandemic hit, making things even worse. These four issues followed kids’ mental health in ECRI’s list of safety concerns: — Violence against health care workers — Clinician needs post-Roe v. Wade — Providers working outside their scope of practice — Failure to detect and treat sepsis in a timely way Workforce shortages are a crosscurrent in the top patient-safety concerns, Schabacker said. “There’s no silver bullet to fix it,” he said. “It needs a will to solve it, and we don't see that.”
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QTrobot and Misty II | University of Cambridge | Turns out looks do matter, at least for robot wellness coaches. Findings from a small University of Cambridge study presented at a human-robot interaction conference suggest that employees had a higher opinion of a toylike robot coach than they did of a robot with human features. With workers facing increasing stress and mental illness, amid a shortage of mental health practitioners, the findings could provide guidance on how to provide cost-effective care. How the study worked: Twenty-six people between ages 18 and 55 were assigned to one of two robot wellness coaches for four weekly sessions. Meet the bots: QTrobot: 90 centimeters tall. QT’s face is a white screen with green eyes and a black-line mouth, embedded in a robot head. QT has a human-looking upper and lower body with shoulders, elbows, hands and legs. Misty II: 36 centimeters tall. Misty’s face is a black screen with green eyes and a white-line mouth embedded in a robot head. Misty has an upper chest but no elbow or hands. Misty’s lower half is a navigation base. “The robots were programmed to have the same personality, the same facial expressions and the same voice, so the only difference between them was the physical robot form,” Minja Axelsson, co-author of the study, which hasn’t yet undergone peer review, said in a statement. The results: Participants rated Misty, the toylike robot, more favorably than QT, the humanoid. They criticized QT’s coaching style, noting that the robot was “not showing any care” and “didn’t add any value.” By contrast, participants said Misty made them feel “a lot more engaged” and had “a calming presence.” The takeaway: “It could be that since the Misty robot is more toy-like, it matched their expectations,” Micol Spitale, lead study author, said in a statement. "Since QT is more humanoid, they expected it to behave like a human, which may be why participants who worked with QT were slightly underwhelmed.”
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