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Five Americans died of rabies last year — the largest number in a decade — and health officials said Thursday that some of the people didn’t realize they had been infected or refused life-saving shots. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report on three of the deaths, all stemming from contact with bats. CDC officials said the deaths were tragic and could have been prevented. (1/6)

One day last fall, a man in his 80s living in Lake County, Ill., woke up to find a bat on his neck. He caught the bat and turned it in to the health department for testing, which revealed the bat had rabies. The man was offered rabies treatment — but refused. “There were multiple hours of consultation over several weeks between the health department and this individual about the seriousness of his exposure, that the bat had tested positive and that vaccines were the only thing that would be guaranteed to save his life,” said Ryan Wallace, a veterinary medical officer and the lead of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s rabies epidemiology team. “He declined.” (Branswell, 1/6)

Down syndrome is the most common genetic disorder, impacting about 1 in 700 newborns around the world. At some point during their first hours and days of embryonic development, their dividing cells fail to properly wriggle a chromosome pair away from each other, leaving an extra copy where it shouldn’t be. Although scientists have known for more than six decades that this extra copy of chromosome 21 causes the cognitive impairment people with Down syndrome experience, exactly how it happens remains a matter of debate. The dominant hypothesis is that people with this syndrome make too much of the proteins encoded in the genes that reside on chromosome 21, and that this overexpression alters the timing, pattern, or extent of neurodevelopment. This theory has a name: the “gene dosage effect.” (Molteni, 1/6)

Combining technologies that proved hugely successful against cancer and in COVID-19 vaccines, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have shown they can effectively treat a leading cause of heart disease. For now the success has only been achieved in mice, but the milestone offers hope for millions of people whose heart muscle is damaged by scar tissue. There is no effective treatment for this fibrosis, which leads to heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States, said Dr. Jonathan Epstein, a Penn professor of cardiovascular research who helped lead the new work, published Thursday in the journal Science. (Weintraub, 1/6)

As more motorists trade in old gas guzzlers for chic electric cars, new research on traffic-related air pollution suggests the switch could benefit millions of children every year. George Washington University researchers studied ground concentrations of nitrogen dioxide in big cities around the world while tracking new cases of asthma that developed in children from 2000 to 2019. They found nitrogen dioxide – a pollutant that primarily comes from tailpipe vehicle emissions –  may have caused nearly 2 million new cases of pediatric asthma every year, according to the study published Wednesday in the Lancet Planetary Health. (Rodriguez, 1/6)

In October, Nadia Popovici, a Seattle Kraken hockey fan, went to a game with her parents. She spotted a strange-looking mole on the neck of an assistant equipment manager for the opposing team, the Vancouver Canucks, and typed out a message to him on her phone. “The mole on the back of your neck is possibly cancerous. Please go see a doctor!” the message read, with the words “mole,” “cancer” and “doctor” colored bright red. (Nierenberg, 1/4)

KHN: A Catch-22 Trips Up Some In Legal Guardianship Who Try To Regain Independence 

Ten years ago, Nicholas Clouse was riding shotgun in his friend’s Camaro when the car jerked and he felt himself flying through the air. Clouse’s head slammed against the passenger-side window. The traumatic brain injury he sustained in the wreck led to severe memory loss, headaches and insomnia. Clouse, who was 18 then, didn’t recognize his friends and family. (Barrett, 1/7)