men & boys
We’re getting closer to male birth control. Men are excited
Maria Fabrizo for STAT
If a cisgender man wants to get on birth control, his only real option is to put on a condom. That, or get or a vasectomy: a surgical procedure to cut the tube that allows sperm to enter semen. These are the same options that have been around since the 1800s. Condoms have user failure rates up to 16%, and vasectomies are an expensive commitment. Luckily — and finally — the options may soon expand.
There is a robust pipeline of male birth control products being tested. If trials are successful, three of them could potentially commercialize in a few years. “We are receiving emails from men all over the world asking to participate” in trials, said Nadja Mannowetz, the co-founder of a San Francisco company conducting trials for a male birth control pill.
Read more from STAT’s Annalisa Merelli about why men want birth control options, what side effects they’re willing to put up with, and how we got here from the early days of “testicular bathing.”
public health
Some actually good infectious disease news
The Guinea worm eradication program is inching closer to completion, with a mere 10 cases of the debilitating illness reported in 2025, the Carter Center announced on Friday. The center, established by the late President Jimmy Carter, has been the lead player in the effort to rid the world of the parasitic worms that cause this horrific illness. The 2025 cases occurred in South Sudan, Chad, and Ethiopia. In 2024, there were 15 cases recorded.
When the eradication program began in 1986, about 3.5 million people in 21 countries were infected each year with Guinea worms, typically acquired through drinking contaminated water. After developing in a human host, a Guinea worm will burrow its way out of its host's body, causing severe pain as it does. People often submerse themselves in water to ease their suffering, allowing the worm to release larva that then infect others. It’s estimated that the eradication effort has averted 100 million cases of the disease. To date, the only other human disease ever eradicated was the virus that caused smallpox. — Helen Branswell
first opinion
Losing a century of public health progress
Earlier this month, the EPA announced it would no longer calculate the economic benefits of lives saved when setting limits on fine particulate matter and ozone. For more than 50 years, the federal agency has used a metric called the “value of statistical life” to weigh the benefits of clean air against the costs of regulation. The agency’s own math has shown that for every dollar spent reducing fine particulate pollution, we get back as much as $77 in health benefits.
“What is the value of a human life?” epidemiologist Michelle Williams writes in a new First Opinion essay. “According to the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency, the answer is zero dollars.” Read more on what’s at stake.
