Happy New Year: Drug makers raise prices again

It’s a new year, and that means it’s time for the first annual drug hikes. Drugmakers have already raised the prices of more than 330 medications in just the first few days of January. The average increase is about 5 percent; the current U.S. inflation rate is about 2.1 percent.

The companies did not provide any reason for the increases.

Practical Skills Refresher Course — now with labs!

Will you be taking your Georgia licensing exam later this year? Do you know someone who will? (Maybe a graduate? Maybe a pharmacist moving to Georgia?) Then brush up on the practical skills you need to have.

GPhA’s crazy-popular program — the “Practical Skills Refresher Course” — is coming in 2020 on four days in four locations. It’s a concentrated, four-hour refresher on terminology, measurements, and the procedures you’ll put into practice. You can just imagine how useful this will be.

NEW: Labs! For 2020 we’ve added “Practical Skills for the Lab” — lab time with an instructor to watch you and provide feedback, in a simulated testing environment. If you’re a student pharmacist or a transfer to Georgia, you want this course. You NEED this course. Click here for more info and to register NOW!

Free drugs

Publix announced it had filled its one millionth free prescription. That’s under a program that provides “14-day supplies of four oral antibiotics, as well as 90-day supplies of maintenance medications used to treat high blood pressure and diabetes” to any Publix customer, period.

Novo Nordisk is offering a free one-time supply (up to three vials or two packs of pens) of insulin to anyone in immediate need; after that it will sell them the drug for $99 for the same amount.

CBD twist

So you know people — users and companies — have been treating CBD like any other supplement (complete with a mix of claims for what it can do)? But the FDA hasn’t made clear where CBD falls in the legality spectrum. Is it a supplement (i.e., it won’t be regulated) or is it a medication (subject to approval)?

Because of that, unhappy CBD users have filed class-action lawsuits. Their claim: CBD isn’t just a supplement.

In two major lawsuits recently filed against Charlotte’s Web and CV Sciences, two of the largest CBD manufacturers in the country, consumers allege that the companies engaged in “false, fraudulent, unfair, deceptive, and misleading” marketing of their CBD products by claiming they were run-of-the-mill dietary supplements, like vitamin D or iron. […]

In all of the cases, they are asking a judge to force the companies to return all of the profits they’ve made from those sales, which could decimate the nascent industry.

The dopamine and the clock

The brain’s pleasure center and its biological clock are apparently — well, if not besties, at least good friends. And that means eating junk food, which increases dopamine, “disrupt normal feeding schedules, resulting in overconsumption,” according to a new study.

Or, if you want to sound smarter:

“We’ve shown that dopamine signaling in the brain governs circadian biology and leads to consumption of energy-dense foods between meals and during odd hours.”

Vaccination reset

So this is both interesting and a bit scary: Apparently HIV treatment can ‘reset’ smallpox (and possibly other) vaccinations.

What the study authors said:

“[A]ntigen-specific CD4+ T cell memory to vaccinations/infections that occurred before HIV infection did not recover after immune reconstitution and a previously unrealized decline in pre-existing antibody responses was observed.”

What it means: If people are treated for HIV after they’ve been vaccinated for smallpox, that treatment causes their T-cells “forget” how to target the smallpox bacteria.

(Unanswered: Does it apply to other diseases? Does re-vaccination work?)