Pharmacy chains sue docs

CVS, Rite Aid, Walgreens, and Walmart are suing at least 500 physicians in Ohio, claiming that they — the doctors — bear some responsibility for the opioid epidemic.

If the pharmacies are found liable in the opioid lawsuit there, those companies want the physicians to be responsible as well.

But they’re walking an interesting line, claiming, essentially, that pharmacists are effectively bottle-fillers, and are not responsible for the medications:

[T]he pharmacy chains are trying to argue in the new legal papers that “we’re not gatekeepers, we’re just toll collectors,” said Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, a University of Georgia law professor who has followed the national opioid litigation closely.

Reducing Georgia’s maternal death rate

As we’ve covered before, Georgia has one of the worst maternal-mortality rates in the world — worse than Uzbekistan. And now a group of lawmakers — the Georgia House Study Committee on Maternal Mortality — has released its first recommendations for improving the health of pregnant women.

For example, while post-partum issues can occur up to six months after birth, Georgians on Medicaid only get 60 days of coverage. The committee’s top recommendation (from the report): “Extend Georgia’s Medicaid coverage for eligible pregnant women to one-year postpartum to allow for continued access to health care services.”

Shout-out to Yao Yao

Ah, the blood-brain barrier — usually a good thing, sometimes a roadblock to treatment, sometimes the cause of a disease.

UGA assistant professor Yao Yao (in the department of pharmaceutical and biomedical sciences) scored himself and his team a $1.88 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study that barrier, and to hopefully find a path to new treatments for stroke and other diseases.

Nice going!

Quick flu updates

At least 15 deaths and 505 hospitalizations in Georgia, according to GPH.

More children (27) have died nationwide than in any recent season.

A new combination, nanoparticle vaccine appears to protect mice against six strains of flu.

Want a baby? Zinc’s not gonna help

Zinc and folic acid can be useful and important supplements … but not for male fertility. So finds a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Live birth rates were 34% when men in the couples received daily doses of folic acid and zinc […] versus 35% in a placebo group.

Good news for toner makers

More than a third of U.S. spending for health insurance, doctor visits, hospital stays, and long-term care is not on care at all — it’s on paperwork.

Forget the cost of meds or visits. We’re pouring money into administration.

According to the study, health administration costs in 2017 were more than fourfold higher per person in the United States than in Canada — $2,479 versus $551 per person. And U.S. spending on insurers’ overhead was $844 per person compared with $146 per person in Canada.

Latest baby powder news

A long-term study of more than 250,000 women found no significant link between talc-based baby powder and ovarian cancer.

“We found a small, but nonstatistically significant, risk. We cannot establish causality. If there is a true association [between talc powder use and ovarian cancer], the increase would likely be very small.”

Older than we thought

The Mysterious Vaping Illness that cropped up last summer? Turns out it’s been around a bit longer — it just wasn’t on anyone’s radar.

Researchers examined posts on an online discussion board for e-cig users from January 2008 to July 2015, and they found that the lung-disease symptoms have been reported for at least the past seven years.

Medicaid: Slowing the decline

A new study in Health Affairs, which looked at 12 southern states (including Georgia), found that people living in Medicaid-expansion states were less likely to experience a “health status decline” than those who live in states that did not expand Medicaid eligibility.

In other words, as one author put it, “Medicaid expansion improved health. But improvements are as much, if not more, a result of stemming of health declines as they are a result of moving people to better states of health.”

Elsewhere: That’s Just Embarrassing edition

The Ohio State Medical Board has received a petition to make ‘being a Bengals or Browns fan’ an eligible condition to receive medical marijuana.