Remember: Region meetings are coming!

With everything that’s been happening in the legislature with our two big bills, this is the perfect time for our annual spring Region Meetings!

That’s where pharmacy professionals from each corner of the state will gather for a great dinner at a local eatery and an update on the legislative situation. You even get an hour of CPE.

Visit GPhA.org/regions to see when your meeting is being held, then sign up for it ASAP — the first ones are April 16 (Albany and Acworth areas) and they continue throughout April

Sign up now — you must register to attend!

DPH gets accredited

Congrats to our friends at the Georgia Department of Public Health — it received national accreditation from the Public Health Accreditation Board.

To receive accreditation, a health department must undergo a rigorous, multi-faceted, peer- reviewed assessment process to ensure it meets or exceeds a set of quality standards and measures.

So high drug prices are needed to pay for research, huh?

What about when U.S. taxpayers pay for that research, the U.S. government patents the drug, and you just manufacture it — and refuse to pay royalties? You wanna explain how you can justify a $2,000 a month price tag?

[CDC researchers] work — almost fully funded by U.S. taxpayers — created a new use for an older prescription drug called Truvada: preventing HIV infection. But the U.S. government, which patented the treatment in 2015, is not receiving a penny for that use of the drug from Gilead Sciences, ­Truvada’s maker, which earned $3 billion in Truvada sales last year.

Moving the goalposts

What do you do when you’re faced with an losartan shortage due to impurities in the supply chain? The obvious, if you’re the FDA: You increase the acceptable level of impurities.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said late Wednesday that it will not object to certain manufacturers temporarily distributing losartan with one impurity above the interim acceptable intake limit until that impurity can be eliminated.

Trust me, I’m on the pill

A male birth-control pill has passed its phase 1 safety trials. (Note: This is not an efficacy trial — that comes later.)

Your dust may be making you fat

Yes, really. Household dust can contain endocrine disruptors, which leads to development of fat cells.

“Interestingly, the greater the extent that the dust was able to promote fat cell development, the greater the BMI of the people living in those homes. We demonstrated a relationship between the chemicals present in the indoor environment and metabolic health,” [Duke University researcher Christopher Kassotis] said during a press conference.

Keep at it, dude. Keep at it.

Statins often not on the menu

Patients who could be taking statins — perhaps should be taking them — aren’t being given the option. (Fear of side effects seems to be the issue.)

The long read: Medicare and the 5 Percent Problem

“Medicare’s Uncapped Drug Costs Take A Big Bite From Already Tight Budgets”

In a standard Medicare drug plan, beneficiaries pay 25 percent of the price of their brand-name drugs until they reach $5,100 in out-of-pocket costs. Once patients reach that threshold, the catastrophic portion of their coverage kicks in, and their obligation drops to 5 percent. But it never disappears. It’s that ongoing 5 percent that hits hard.