Four vs five (work days, that is)

A European study found some interesting results of shortening the work week from five days to a streamlined four:

• Blue collar workers cut their smoking by a whopping 19 to 24 percent, but their BMI went up.
• White collar workers didn’t change their smoking habits, but their BMI dropped about two percent.

And yep, there’s a logic to both.

Trust issues

For the first time in years, pharmacists have slipped in Gallup’s annual ‘who do you think is honest and ethical’ survey. Nurses, as always, are in the top spot, but this year engineers are in second place, medical doctors in third, and pharmacists are at #4.

Lowest in the rankings are, as usual, used-car dealers and members of Congress.

Good jobs news

Looks like a good year for pharmacists: “Pharmacy job postings were up 9.7% in December compared with December 2019 levels, according to data from the jobs site Indeed.”

Swimming in circles

The kind of salmonella bacteria that causes gastroenteritis has a funky method of swimming — it runs and it tumbles.

“Whoopdie-doo,” you say. But get this: When it wants to infect a cell, the bacteria has to straighten out first — what’s called “controlled smooth swimming.” And to do that they need a particular protein.

So NIH scientists think that by targeting that protein (“Methyl-accepting chemotaxis protein C”) they might be able to keep the bacteria tumbling and unable to straighten out to penetrate cells.

Even better: That same “controlled smooth swimming” might be common across bacteria, meaning it could be useful for a whole new type of antibiotic.

It’s not your typical asthma treatment

If you’ve got asthmatic mice and are tired of dealing with those tiny inhalers — good news.

Bronchodilators and steroids can treat asthma’s inflammation, but they don’t stop the mucus production that goes along with it. But now University of Colorado scientists have figured out which molecules cause that overproduction (polymeric mucin glycoproteins, if you must know). They targeted those molecules with a drug called TCEP* — and it both stopped the overproduction and “quickly reversed the disease.”

Even better, “It also worked on human mucus taken as samples from asthma patients.”

Now they think it could be added to asthma drugs, but might also improve COPD, cystic fibrosis, and other lung-condition drugs.

* (tris(2-carboxyethyl)phosphine), since you asked

Nobody knows the rodents I’ve seen

With everyone and his little brother experimenting on mice and rats, you might wonder just how many there actually are in labs. The answer is … no one knows. But that hasn’t stopped them from guessing, er, “extrapolating.”

A new study says 111 million, but “many in the biomedical community” say it’s not even close — that the reality is between 10 and 25 million. Another estimate says about 23 million. Another says 14.8 million. And yet another says 80 to 100 million.

And then there’s the question of whether they should be covered by the federal Animal Welfare Act, which everyone agrees about. (Just kidding. Not even close.)

That healthy glow

If you’re interested in that healthy, “glowing” skin, dermatologists have an unexpected suggestion.

The Long Read: GoodRx edition

The U.S. healthcare marketplace isn’t a traditional marketplace (where people can compare prices, make decisions freely, and do all those things economists like to assume we do). But maybe (says Forbes) GoodRx is giving us an idea of how it might be.

If nothing else, the piece is an excellent look at exactly how GoodRx works.