closer look
STAT's year in photos
Christine Kao for STAT
Every time people are kind enough to let STAT reporters into their lives and trust us with their stories, it’s a gift. We spend hours with them, sometimes spread over months or years, and get a sense of who they are, what motivates them.
But how do we convey that to you, the reader? We try to do it with our words, and our talented photographers find ways to tell stories with single images.
Our multimedia editor Alissa Ambrose and picture editor Crystal Milner have a visual feast for you from the past year: STAT’s most memorable photos of 2024.
Take some time to look back today, whether it’s the staring into the eyes of women with sickle cell disease bravely telling the stories of how they were coerced into sterilizations, a widow who experienced the human toll of UnitedHealth Group’s pursuit of profits, or the unspoken but visibly apparent bond between a husband and wife team who accomplished more for science together than they could have apart.
Infectious disease
California is on fire with virus
For months, federal officials have expressed confidence that they know how H5N1 bird flu is spreading amongst dairy cows: Movement of animals between farms, on workers' boots or clothing, and through common, shared equipment.
But to other epidemiologists and infectious disease experts, that doesn’t explain why California has exploded with H5N1, even at farms that observe strict sanitation protocols. The country’s largest dairy-producing state has now detected the virus on over 650 dairy farms — about half of them in the last month alone.
Seema Lakdawala, an associate professor in the department of microbiology and immunology at Emory University School of Medicine, bristles at some of the USDA’s theories. More likely, workers are contracting the virus themselves and spreading it to other animals. She’s observed farmworkers “using the same rags to dry the cows and wipe their own faces so there’s a lot of potential contaminants happening right there,” she said.
Read more from STAT’s Megan Molteni for more potential reasons behind the spread, and why current protocols aren’t able to detect and stop the virus.
One Big Number
1 in 127
That’s how many people in the world are estimated to be on the autism spectrum, as of 2021, according to the latest estimates from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors and published yesterday in Lancet Psychiatry. This is much higher than the 2019 estimate of 1 in 271 people. The number changed largely due to a change in methodology: The report now excludes studies that make their estimates solely based off of medical records, which don’t account for every case.
