
"The Power of Social Media": More than $2M crowdfunded for medicine to save a little girl's life
CBSN
Cairo — Roqaia Reda was born on July 13, 2020, in Alexandria, Egypt. She seemed a happy and healthy baby girl for her first six months, but then her parents started noticing some unusual symptoms. After a series of tests, Roqaia was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a rare degenerative neuromuscular disorder that leaves patients without control of their bodies.
In the most severe cases, which are generally those that manifest in early childhood, patients often die before they reach their second birthday. Most people with moderate cases live into adulthood, but they're often left unable to walk.
There are a couple drugs to treat SMA in young children, the most effective being a single-dose, intravenous treatment of Zolgensma. The gene therapy, which was only approved for use on young SMA patients in the United States in 2019, is often referred to as the most expensive drug in the world. Manufacturer Novartis puts the price tag for a treatment at about $2.1 million.

Unprecedented footage of an elusive deep-sea creature came to light this week. On an expedition through the Southern Ocean last Christmas Day, researchers discovered the Gonatus antarcticus, a mysterious species of squid known to roam the freezing waters around Antarctica but never seen alive before in its natural habitat.

London — President Trump declared on Wednesday morning that a U.S. trade "deal with China is done." The American leader offered a few key details of the agreement reached between senior U.S. and Chinese trade representatives in London on Tuesday, but he acknowledged that both he and Chinese President Xi Jinping were both yet to formally sign off on the agreement.

Jerusalem — Israel deported activist Greta Thunberg on Tuesday, the country's Foreign Ministry said, a day after the Gaza-bound ship she was on with 11 other people was seized by the Israeli military. Thunberg left on a flight to France and was then headed to her home country of Sweden, the Foreign Ministry said in a post on X. It posted a photo of Thunberg, a climate activist who shuns air travel, seated on a plane.