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Children’s Hospital Denies Girl Spot on Transplant List Due to Vaccine Status
A Tri-State mom is looking for another hospital for her daughter after Cincinnati Children’s denied putting her on the heart transplant list due to her vaccination status.
12-year-old Adaline is a happy girl from Batesville, Indiana, living with Ebstein’s anomaly and Wolff-Parkinson-White (WPW) syndrome, two heart conditions.
Jeneen Deal and her husband adopted Adaline from China as a four year-old, knowing she would need a heart transplant someday. “She’s my child, and I want the best for her,” Jeneen shared. The Deals have done most of Adaline’s care through Cincinnati Children’s but are now looking elsewhere after the hospital declined to put her on the transplant list.
Cincinnati Children’s requires patients to have both the flu and COVID-19 vaccines, but the Deals have not vaccinated any of their children due to their non-denominational religion. “I called the child’s advocate at Cincinnati Children’s to see if they could help us with a religious exemption and so forth,” Jeneen said. “He came back and said they are not going to change their policy, and this is what it is, and we are more than welcome to find another hospital if we didn’t like it.”
The Selling of Our Children: The Hidden Danger of Student Data Abuse
In an era where data is the new oil, the personal information of millions of high school and college students is being harvested, sold, and exploited with little oversight or transparency. Organizations like the National Research Center for College and University Admissions (NRCCUA) and others are at the forefront of this troubling trend, manipulating students and school administrators into unwittingly providing sensitive data.
The consequences of this unchecked marketplace for student data are profound, raising urgent questions about privacy, ethics, and the need for stronger legal protections.
The Illusion of Consent: Do Students Know What They’re Signing Up For? One of the most insidious aspects of this data trade is the lack of informed consent.
As Inside Higher Ed reported, many students are unaware of the extent to which their personal information is being collected and sold. Surveys administered by organizations like NRCCUA often appear innocuous, framed as tools to help students explore college options or scholarships. However, these surveys are frequently designed to extract detailed personal data, including academic performance, socioeconomic status, and even students’ “hopes and dreams,” as Politico revealed.
Children’s Minnesota Testing Vaccine Against Deadly Pediatric Brain Cancer
The Minnesota Star Tribune reported:
Children’s Minnesota is testing the safety of a new vaccine combination to combat one of the deadliest pediatric cancers, which could give new hope for children who would otherwise typically die within months of a diagnosis. The brain cancer — diffuse midline glioma, or DMG — has confounded clinicians. Because it spreads so rapidly, doctors can’t surgically remove the tumors. The brain’s protective barrier also prevents chemotherapy drugs from killing the cancer cells.
“The cure rate for DMG is less than 1%, and the median overall survival is nine to 11 months,” said Dr. Anne Bendel, the Children’s researcher leading the trial. “And that statistic has not changed since the 1950s.” University of Minnesota researchers developed a vaccine that stimulates the immune system to attack these cancer cells but discovered in a clinical trial several years ago the cancer cells fight back by releasing proteins that blunt the immune response.
The researchers then developed a synthetic peptide that seeks to counteract the cancer response and boost vaccine effectiveness. Children’s is using the experimental vaccine and peptide in combination with an early stage trial to prove safety and determine the best dosage. Both have been licensed to Minneapolis-based OX2 Therapeutics, a biotech spinoff launched by U of M researchers Michael Olin and Dr. Chris Moertel.
Children With Mild Peanut Allergy May Be Able to Eat Peanut Butter, Trial Shows
Children with milder forms of peanut sensitivity may be able to overcome their allergy by consuming increasing amounts of store-bought peanut butter, a new study suggests.
All of the 32 children in the study, who received 18 months of this immunotherapy, were able to consume the equivalent of three tablespoons of peanut butter without experiencing reactions, according to the report published Monday in NEJM Evidence.
Parents were advised that this strategy should be followed only under the supervision of an allergist, the researchers cautioned. Between 1% and 2% of children and adults in the U.S. have a peanut allergy, according to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology.
WHO Launches Plan for Free Child Cancer Medicines
The World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday launched a new platform providing cost-free cancer medicines for thousands of children living in low- and middle-income countries, in a bid to improve lagging survival rates. The first medicines were being delivered to Mongolia and Uzbekistan, the WHO said, with further shipments planned for Ecuador, Jordan, Nepal and Zambia, as part of the project’s pilot phase.
The treatments are expected to reach around 5,000 children with cancer this year across at least 30 hospitals in those six nations. “Countries in the pilot phase will receive an uninterrupted supply of quality-assured childhood cancer medicines at no cost,” the UN health agency said in a statement.
The WHO said that childhood cancer survival rates in low- and middle-income countries were often below 30%, compared with around 80% in high-income countries. “For too long, children with cancer have lacked access to life-saving medicines,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. The platform will bring “health and hope to children around the world”, he added.
