Ranitidine surprise

So, you know about those Zantac/ranitidine recalls over a carcinogen found in the drug? Turns out it might be caused by the drug sitting too long, or in too warm an environment — i.e., not the manufacturing, but simply the chemistry of ranitidine.

Start the new year with an MTM certificate

Forget “Spend more time at the gym” or “Keep in better touch with friends” or “Cut back on cheese” — make a real New Year’s resolution: Earn yourself a certificate that makes you a better pharmacist!

Impress your patients, your employer, and those friends you’re keeping in touch with when you show them your brand-new, ACPE-approved certificate from APhA:

Delivering Medication Therapy Management Services: A Certificate Training Program for Pharmacists offers a full-day of training on medication therapy management, from soup to nuts: developing a program, implementing it, marketing it, delivering it, and sustaining it.

It’s coming fast: Sunday, January 12, from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. at GPhA Headquarters in Sandy Springs (map).

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO and register today!

Dementia vaccine?

We can’t believe we missed this story: After a successful trial in mice, a vaccine “designed to prevent neurodegeneration associated with Alzheimer’s disease” is about ready for human trials.

The research revealed the vaccine led to significant decreases in both tau and amyloid accumulation in the brains of bigenic mice engineered to exhibit aggregations of these toxic proteins.

Berry finder

If you woke up this morning and thought, “My gosh! It’s cold and flu season! Where can I get my elderberries*?” fear not — the AJC has you covered with “Three Georgia-made ways to stock up on elderberries for cold season.”

* And really, who among us hasn’t?

We’re about to get a lot more info about the opioid crisis

A federal judge in Cleveland has ordered CVS, Rite Aid, Walmart, Walgreens, and other pharmacies to provide 14 years of data on the opioid prescriptions they filled “and hand it to plaintiffs seeking billions of dollars from the companies for their alleged role in the opioid abuse crisis.”

Gene delivery danger

Gene therapy relies on a virus — well, a ‘stripped-down viral vessel’ — to deliver its payload into cells. But a new study seems to indicate the virus may not be as benign as expected. It seems that the carrier (adeno-associated virus or AAV) can insert some of its own genes into cells — kind of like the UPS man not only delivering a package, but also using your bathroom.

There’s good and bad to this. By getting into the cells, the AAV might make the treatment it carries more effective … but it also might mess with the cells’ DNA and cause cancer.

The Long(ish) Read: Rural Healthcare edition

“Wellness in rural Georgia: Hope, hard work and some frustration” from Georgia Health News.