Georgia Covid update

Georgia’s Covid case numbers have dropped significantly (-30%) in the past two weeks. Hospitalizations are also falling, but not as quickly (-3%).

That’s overall. Fifteen counties are still seeing cases rise — notably Rabun (+113% over the last two weeks) and Chattahoochee (+64%).

But, as expected, deaths are rising statewide (+82%) as they tend to lag hospitalizations by two to three weeks. So expect those numbers to go down in early October … except in those 15 counties.

Beer and tacos! (And students!)

You never need an excuse for beer and tacos, but we’ll give you one anyway: It’s the 2021 Policy on Tap — a fun-filled evening for student pharmacists to eat, drink, be merry, and (in between), hear about pharmacy legislation that will impact their careers. And then back to the beer and tacos.

It’s Thursday, October 7, 2021, at Tucker Brewing Company in, well, Tucker. Sample the brews, enjoy the tacos, and tell yourself it’s “studying.”

Heck, you can even bring one guest — better still, grab some other student pharmacists from any pharmacy school (with permission, of course).

Click here for info and the Google Forms registration. Payment is by Venmo, instructions are on the page. Questions? Utoy Wong’s your guy: utoy.c.wongs@live.mercer.edu.

This is your brain on Mozart

Back in the mid-’90s, the idea that listening to classical music could make your baby smarter was all the rage. Thanks to a paper in Nature called “Music and spatial task performance,” the Mozart Effect was born. And, like Beanie Babies and AOL chat rooms*, it soon faded into obscurity.

But now it’s back — not as a way to make babies smarter, but as a treatment for epilepsy. Really. A study out of Dartmouth says that, despite its having too many notes, listening to Mozart’s* “Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major”…

…for at least 30 seconds may be associated with less frequent spikes of certain electrical activity in the brains of people whose epilepsy does not respond to medication.

* They tried other music, including Wagner, Buddy Holly, Judas Priest, and Nickelback. Unfortunately, the latter violated the Protection of Human Subjects in Medical Experimentation Act and they had to stop.

Drug approvals: We report, you can decide

Remember the “Ice Bucket Challenge” from the Long Long Ago? Unlike most other “challenges” it had a goal: to raise money for ALS research. And it succeeded — the money helped pay for the development of a potential treatment called AMX0035 from Amylyx Pharmaceuticals.

In April, though, the FDA said it wouldn’t approve AMX0035 without a phase 3 study.

Then Biogen’s Aduhelm Alzheimer’s drug got the agency’s approval despite lack of solid evidence. (Cue the kerfuffle.)

So in June, the ALS Association called out FDA about that: “[W]e are left to wonder the FDA is not using similar flexibility for a promising ALS treatment with strong safety data that provides clinically meaningful benefits.”

And now … the FDA has said why yes, it will accept AMX0035 for review without that phase 3 study.

Which prompted the folks at Fierce Pharma to ask the obvious question: “Is the FDA heading down a new path of bending to public pressure and advocacy?”

The test so cool…

Normally, at this point, we wouldn’t report Yet Another Covid Test, but we couldn’t resist. A new saliva test out of Rockefeller University “performs as well, if not better, than FDA-authorized nasal and oral swab tests.”

The name of this saliva test? DRUL.

I suppose this is good(ish) news

When people under 30 (“whippersnappers”) get long Covid, they seem not to have as many cognitive effects as older folks — less of that “brain fog.” But, found researchers from the University of Texas at Arlington, they do tend to have more “vascular disfunction in limbs” — and that’s those who were otherwise healthy.

What does that mean? Not much on its own, but it’s another piece in the long-Covid puzzle.

The Long Read: The other point of view

You kids might not know this, but once upon a time, people could disagree about … well, anything, without feeling like those who disagreed were evil, idiots, or both. (It was a simpler time.)

• Obviously anyone who’s anti-vax is an idiot, evil, or both.
• Obviously anyone who trusts vaccines implicitly is an idiot, evil, or both.

And thus we have today’s Long Read: “Vaccine Tribalism Is Poisoning Progress on COVID Science” — with thanks to Brenton Lake for finding it.

Trigger warning: You might not agree with everything.