Pandemic update: Georgia keeps getting better

From Amber Schmidtke, who’s tracking Georgia’s numbers:

• Cases last week: Down 20% (the lowest total since June 2020)
• Deaths: Down 36% (third best week of the pandemic)
• Hospital admissions: Down 10% (second best week of the pandemic)

“If there was any doubt that these vaccines work, I think we can clearly see that they do. Let’s keep things going.”

It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it

A group of researchers led by a team from the University of California has created a dashboard of wastewater-based epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 — essentially, where sewage testing is being conducted for SARS-CoV-2, including sites in the Atlanta and Athens areas. That kind of testing can help track how the pathogen is spreading — or receding — and a heck of a lot of organizations are involved around the world.

It might be a little late for Covid, but now the mechanism is in place … for next time.

You’ll flip for Shannon*

Don’t miss Shannon Miller, most decorated Olympic gymnast in U.S. history (we’re talking seven Olympic medals, and the only woman to be inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame … twice). Oh, and the USA Gymnastics Hall of Fame, the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame, and the Women’s International Sports Hall of Fame.

She’ll be keynoting the Saturday general session of the Georgia Pharmacy Convention — just one more reason to register today (at GPhAconvention.com, if you forgot).

Check out her winning routine in Atlanta right here. And here she is speaking in 2020.

* Worst. Headline. Ever.

Tweezing through bacteria

Want to fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria? Use a tweezer to rip open its protective shell to let medication get in. of course the tweezer is molecular-sized and the shell is a protective film, but that’s the general idea, and that’s what a team of international researchers did.

“The tweezers are just like your home tweezers but a million times smaller, and instead of plucking hairs they attack fibers of the bacteria’s biofilm. By doing that they break the biofilm, making it more vulnerable to human immune defenses and external substances that are used against bacteria like antibiotics.”

Okay, NOW it’s serious

“Bald men more than twice as likely to develop severe COVID-19 infection.” We assume it’s because they are so darned sexy that social distancing is much more difficult (and has nothing to do with the androgen receptor gene).

Guts, bugs, and neurodegenerative diseases

We still don’t quite know what causes some big neurodegenerative diseases — think Parkinson’s. University of Florida researchers are pretty sure gut bacteria play a role, and they’ve started to narrow down the potential culprits.

What’s interesting is that the presence of certain gut bacteria isn’t a result of diseases like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, but could be the cause. They found that adding certain bacteria to the guts of C. elegans worms caused proteins to misfold and aggregate in tissue.

“We saw that worms colonized by certain bacteria species were lit up with aggregates that were toxic to tissues, while those colonized by the control bacteria were not.”

But it’s not the bacteria themselves, because offspring of the affected worms also have this misfolding reaction. So yeah, much more research to be done.

Today’s press release Mad Libs™

Today’s game-changer could revolutionize disease treatment against cancer and comes from U Mass in the form of nanoparticles.

It combines the small size of antibody-drug conjugates with the low side effects of biologics. “So, safer drugs are delivered to the right cell—the result would be a treatment with fewer side effects.”

When it comes to BP control, 20% take one step back

Some new research found a scary bit of info about polypharmacy: “Nearly 1 in 5 adults with high blood pressure, a leading risk factor for heart disease and stroke, also take a medicine that could be elevating their blood pressure.”

The biggest culprits: antidepressants, NSAIDs, and oral steroids.

Ibuprofen and asthma and kids, oh my

Keep this tidbit in mind: Ibuprofen seems to be a good choice for kids who are hospitalized for asthma. So say researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, at least, who looked at the records of almost 1,800 peds patients.

[T]he researchers found that patients who received ibuprofen had a shorter mean length of stay (1.98 days) compared with those treated with acetaminophen (2.48 days).

The Long Read: “The Psychedelic Revolution Is Coming”

A couple of times in the past weeks we’ve covered stories about psychedelics being used to treat mental health issues. Is it a trend? Seems so — enough that the New York Times did a whole big Sunday story on it.

After decades of demonization and criminalization, psychedelic drugs are on the cusp of entering mainstream psychiatry, with profound implications for a field that in recent decades has seen few pharmacological advancements for the treatment of mental disorders and addiction.

Cassandra chronicles

If you liked Moneyball or The Big Short, take note: Author Michael Lewis’s next book is The Premonition — about America’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Each December, [California deputy public health officer Charity] Dean would write her new year resolutions on the back of a photograph of her grandmother. On 20 December 2019, she wrote down two things. “1) Stay sober. 2) It has started.” She had a kind of sixth sense that the viral pandemic she had long been expecting had begun.