O. Rose Broderick

New York

Disability Reporting Fellow at STAT

Articles

RFK Jr. promises autism answers by September. Prominent researchers and advocates have heard little

1 week ago | autism.einnews.com | Isabella Cueto |Tara Bannow |Anil Oza |O. Rose Broderick

WASHINGTON — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says the country will soon know what is causing a rise in autism rates, but there is little sign he has a team in place yet. Nearly two dozen prominent voices from mainstream autism research and in the anti-vaccine world said they have not been approached by Kennedy, and have no details about the proposed studies. On Wednesday, the health secretary appeared at a press conference alongside Walter Zahorodny, director of a New Jersey autism surveillance study.
RFK Jr calls rising autism rates an ‘epidemic.’ Autistic people call it a condition to live with

1 week ago | statnews.com | O. Rose Broderick

A new federal report suggests that U.S. autism rates are rising modestly, an increase that health researchers said reflected expanded diagnostic tools and access to care, among other factors. But health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. instead has pointed to the data as evidence of a growing crisis.
New thought-to-speech brain device allows for ‘natural conversation’

2 weeks ago | statnews.com | O. Rose Broderick

Neuroscientists inched closer last week to developing a commercial device that can instantly translate brain activity into speech for people with severe paralysis. A team of researchers from University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Francisco were able to solve a key problem for many brain-computer interfaces: lag. Their Nature Neuroscience study describes how the device shrunk the time between a person’s thoughts and how soon it broadcast the study participant’s words.
New thought-to-speech brain device allows for ‘natural conversation’

2 weeks ago | flipboard.com | O. Rose Broderick

6 hours agoThe worsening problems come as Elon Musk’s DOGE team pushes for more cuts at the agency, including in the department that oversees the website. Retirees and disabled people are facing chronic website outages and other access problems as they attempt to log in to their online Social Security …
How the Trump administration will fight drug overdoses

2 weeks ago | statnews.com | O. Rose Broderick

Get your daily dose of health and medicine every weekday with STAT’s free newsletter Morning Rounds. Sign up here. The news doesn’t stop. We started a running tab of senior FDA officials who have left the agency to help you (and us) keep track. Happy Friday, y’all. Billions to be slashed from NIH contractsNational Institutes of Health leaders must figure out how to cut $2.6 billion in contracts from the biomedical research agency’s budget by April 8, according to several sources.
HHS firings undermine federal government's ability to care for vulnerable Americans

3 weeks ago | statnews.com | O. Rose Broderick

The Trump administration’s decision to fire 10,000 workers across U.S. health agencies looks set to disrupt the flow of millions of dollars in grants and deprive Americans with disabilities of critical services they depend on, according to advocates and federal workers. The cuts, ostensibly to reduce redundancies and increase efficiency, have gutted entire agencies under the Department of Health and Human Services, and closed divisions across several agencies that explicitly deal with disability.
Ambitious NIH drive to solve brain mysteries faces uncertain future

3 weeks ago | statnews.com | Jonathan Wosen |O. Rose Broderick

In 2021, scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, decoded brain signals from a man who hadn’t spoken in more than 15 years to generate words that flashed on a screen. This March, Medtronic, a medical device company, won regulatory approval for a first-of-its-kind therapy that delivers precise, adjustable pulses of electricity to the brains of people with Parkinson’s disease.
The protective power of gender-affirming hormones, part two

3 weeks ago | statnews.com | O. Rose Broderick

Get your daily dose of health and medicine every weekday with STAT’s free newsletter Morning Rounds. Sign up here. The Department of Health and Human Services is cutting 20,000 employees. It’s a chaotic time. Help us sift through the information and submit an anonymous tip here. The Department of Health and Human Services announced Thursday its plan to fire 10,000 employees and radically reorganize what they see as a bloated federal health care bureaucracy.