Lyme treatment alternative

You get Lyme, you reach for the doxy. Everyone knows that. But doxycycline is broad-spectrum, and these days that’s a no-no. Presenting … hygromycin A!

Researchers at the Northeastern and the University of Oklahoma discovered that, produced by the Streptomyces hygroscopicus bacteria, hygromycin A targets the Lyme-carrying bacteria (B. burgdorferi) specifically, and is less disruptive to the gut biome to boot.

But here’s the extra cool part: Not only did hygromycin A clear the infection in mice it was given to directly, it also worked on animals that ingested it in bait. Meaning it could be spread in the wild to stop the Lyme before it gets to ticks … and to people.

Mix and match approved

The FDA has 1) approved booster shots for people who got the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, and B) approved mixing vaccines — the booster doesn’t need to be the same kind as the original.

Yet more nut news

Nuts, it seems, can cut the chance of breast cancer recurrence. In the latest “nuts are good for you” news (and not sponsored by nut growers!), Vanderbilt University Medical Center researchers found that regular nut consumers had higher overall survival rate and a higher “disease-free survival” rate than non-eaters.

And, they note, “The associations did not vary by nut type” — and even include peanuts, which someone in the room always has to point out are not actually nuts.

Clean out those medicine cabinets!

It’s that time again — time to tell your patients and customers to dump their unwanted drugs.

This Saturday, October 23, is DEA’s 21st National Prescription Drug Take Back Day! Woo-hoo! If you don’t have a disposal or dropbox in your pharmacy, just direct folks to prescriptiondrugdisposal.com for a handy-dandy map.

A little more info about CBD and pain

There are people who swear by CBD for pain (and, to be honest, a lot of other benefits), but actual studies are lacking. Enter Syracuse University psychology researchers. They tested CBD for pain — and even lied to participants to see if there was a placebo effect.

Their findings were interesting. CBD didn’t make the pain go away, but it did make it better.

“It’s not sunshine and rainbows pleasant, but something slightly less bothersome. […] CBD and expectancies didn’t significantly reduce the volume of the pain, but they did make it less unpleasant—it didn’t bother them as much.”

Next up: Determining the mechanism — how does it do what it does?

We would recall this, too

Merck is recalling a lot of its injectable Cubicin (i.e., daptomycin) because of pieces of glass found in the bottles.

FDA approves, Medicare pays

Medicare spent almost $600 million over three years on cancer drugs that the FDA approved (as part of its “accelerated approval” program) that turned out to be useless.

Apparently, in a rush to get these experimental meds to patients, the agency approved them before they were tested, you know, to see if they actually worked. Spoiler: Most didn’t.

More than $170 million of this spending was for products voluntarily withdrawn by their manufacturers after clinical trials showed that they did not improve overall survival in people with various types of cancer.

The analysis was published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Organ transplant — an actual game changer

“Game-changer” (like “hero” or “awesome”) has lost a lot of its meaning. But here’s a case where it really does apply: Surgeons transplanted a kidney from a genetically engineered pig to a human patient … and it worked.

Many caveats. It’s the first of its kind. It was done with a brain-dead patient, and outside the body. But the organ, designed to avoid rejection, began working immediately.

“It was better than I think we even expected. It just looked like any transplant I’ve ever done from a living donor. A lot of kidneys from deceased people don’t work right away, and take days or weeks to start.

TB spreads by breathing

Watch a Western (or a Victorian drama) and you learn that tuberculosis is spread by coughing. Sufferers (looking at you, Doc Holliday) are seen with a handkerchief in hand to keep it from spreading. But it turns out that it may not help. TB, it seems, spreads just from breathing deeply — no coughing required.

Some bacteria were thought to be released when a person breathed, but much less than by coughing. The new finding does not change that understanding […] But if an infected person breathes 22,000 times per day while coughing up to 500 times, then coughing accounts for as little as 7 percent of the total bacteria emitted by an infected patient.

Anthem’s doing fine, thanks

If you’ve been worried about health insurance company profits during the pandemic, don’t be. Anthem is the latest one to announce big profits, reporting a 15% revenue increase in the second quarter of 2021. Whew!

Who’s got the best vaccination rate?

When we say “Georgia is ranked such-and-such in the U.S.,” you think it’s out of 50 states. Maybe 51 if you count DC. But when it comes to vaccination rate, the highest in the country is … Puerto Rico.

Not only does the U.S. territory have an 81% vaccination rate — compared to 66% for the country as a whole and 56% for Georgia — it also has the second-lowest rate of new cases behind the Northern Mariana Islands*. Yeah, we own those, too.

* Georgia is a respectable #17