California pharmacy-school cheating scandal

That isn’t clickbait — it’s real. More than 100 questions from the state’s licensing exam were leaked, so the state is requiring the 1,400 people who took it since July to re-take the exam. And yes, some have lost their jobs over this because they can’t prove they passed.

Regions meetings are under way

Check out these pics from the Athens and Ellijay Region Presidents’ Meetings on Thursday:

When is your meeting? Check GPhA.org/regions to find out and sign up — it’s coming up in the next week or two!

Bad news for J&J

The FDA has found asbestos in Johnson & Johnson Baby Powder. How much? A whopping 0.00002% at most — but that was enough to trigger a recall of that lot (#22318RB). (Talc and asbestos are often found together when mined, so cleaning out traces of the latter is critical.)

And bad news for baby-food makers

A test of baby foods found 95 percent of them contained toxic metals, including arsenic, cadmium, lead, or mercury. Bad manufacturing? Not at all.

Heavy metals are naturally occurring in soil and water and are found at elevated levels in fields polluted by pesticides, contaminated fertilizer, airborne contaminants and industrial operations. Food crops uptake these metals naturally.

Buying organic products won’t help at all, the researchers point out. The best they can do is avoid fruit juice and rice, carrots, and sweet potatoes, all of which tend to absorb more of the contaminants.

ARBs and suicide

There seems to be an odd connection between one particular kind of blood-pressure meds — angiotensin receptor blockers — and a higher risk of suicide.

“But certainly if I had a choice as a patient, I would be choosing the ACE inhibitor over the ARB.”

No heart problems? No statins needed

They don’t appear to do any good for people whose hearts are healthy. Guidelines have changed, expanding the number of people statins are recommended for. Taking advantage of that use expansion, Irish researchers looked to see if more statin use led to healthier people. (Spoiler: Not really.)

[T]heir analysis suggested that none of those classified as low or moderate risk in primary prevention would reach acceptable levels of risk reduction (“absolute benefit”) to justify taking a daily statin.

Did you know…

Some insurers (e.g., UnitedHealthcare) are covering genetic tests to help patients (maybe) determine which psychiatric drugs are most likely to work for them. But do those tests really work? Maybe.