Today’s Covid treatment

You might think of echinacea for colds, but of course it’s being researched for treating Covid-19, too. A group of European researchers looked at the existing studies and found that … well look at that, echinacea does have broad antiviral properties. (It appears to envelope a bunch of respiratory pathogens, including coronaviruses, lowering symptoms and reducing viral loads.)

As usual, of course, more testing is needed.

Don’t forget to nominate someone!

If you know someone who’s a bit extraordinary — at least in the field of pharmacy — it’s your sacred duty to nominate her, him, it, or them for a 2022 GPhA award.

The deadline is less than a month away: February 1. So it’s time to start choosing the best of the best in Georgia pharmacy, with awards presented in style at the 2022 Georgia Pharmacy Convention in (on?) Amelia Island, Fla.

What awards, you ask? The details are at GPhA.org/awards, but here’s the list:

• The Bowl of Hygeia: You know it or you don’t — it’s among the most prestigious awards in pharmacy and the only one with a Wikipedia page.
• Larry L. Braden Meritorious Service Award: GPhA’s highest honor
• Distinguished Young Pharmacist Award (“Young” meaning in the profession for less than a decade)
• Excellence in Innovation Award for Pharmacy Practice
• Faculty Member of the Year
• Jim Bartling Student Pharmacist of the Year*
• Pharmacy Technician of the Year

Yes, these are GPhA awards, but nominations come from you, the members. That’s what gives them meaning. And it starts now.

Visit our awards page at GPhA.org/awards for more information on award criteria, and to make your nominations. The deadline for submissions is February 1, 2022.

* Note that, by tradition, the winner of this award is expected to buy a round drinks for the other student pharmacists attending the convention.

A vaccine against dog allergies?

Instead of forcing people’s immune systems to tolerate dogs (as most dog-allergy treatments being researched do), some Japanese researchers are trying something different.

Fun fact: Dogs have seven allergans, “Can f 1” through “Can f 7,” but one — Can f 1 — is responsible for most allergic reactions.

The researcher’s plan is to look deep and determine Can f 1’s IgE epitopes (the parts recognized by the immune system). They want to design a drug that trains the immune system to attack that, ergo, a vaccine against Can f 1 … and therefore a vaccine against dog allergies.

M-m-m-my flurona

Israel has reported the world’s first case of ‘flurona’ — a flu-Covid double infection. No, the patient wasn’t vaccinated, but she was pregnant. Luckily her symptoms were mild.

The pay-attention supplement … for mom

Mom, if you want your seven year old to pay better attention … well, you may be almost eight years too late.

Choline. You needed to have taken choline while you were pregnant — and not just some choline. You needed twice the recommended amount. All this comes out of Cornell research that found “Seven-year-old children performed better on a challenging task requiring sustained attention if their mothers consumed twice the recommended amount of choline during their pregnancy.”

Most prenatal vitamins don’t include it, in part because it wasn’t considered all that important.

“Current recommendations for pregnant women were set in 1998 and are based on the amount of choline needed to prevent liver dysfunction in men, not on the more relevant outcome of offspring neurocognitive development.”

Captain Obvious turns his head

“Coughing Downward Reduces Spread of Respiratory Droplets”

Red means “Get that thing off me!”

Instead of vaccinating against Lyme disease, why not vaccinate people against ticks? Sort of. Yale researchers are developing an mRNA ‘vaccine’ that creates a reaction to a tick bite — a red rash that spreads quickly, so it’s noticeable before the tick has fed long enough to introduce the Lyme-causing B. burgdorferi bacteria.

“When you get early redness and early recognition, you pull the tick off. In our experience, when we pulled the tick off when redness occurred, protection against Lyme disease was very strong.”

Smells like metastases

If you woke up today not thinking the human body is amazingly complex, here’s a wake-up call: A gene responsible for the sense of smell is also apparently important for breast cancer metastasis, as it helps the tumor cells hijack the body’s signalling pathways.

Researchers at Mass General Hospital found that inhibiting the gene, OR5B21, “significantly decreased the metastasis of breast cancer cells.”

“The common perception is that the only role of olfactory receptors, which line the nasal cavity and relay sensory data to the brain, is to recognize odor and smell. Our work suggests that the olfactory receptor 5B21 is also a novel oncogene that may figure prominently in cancer progression by driving breast cancer cells to the brain and other sites in the body.”

Elsewhere: A Pound of Cure edition

Florida and Texas, two states with possibly the strongest anti-mask/anti-vaccine/anti-prevention stances when it comes to Covid-19 are now demanding federal help to deal with the shocking — shocking! — spread of the virus. Florida wants antibody doses*, Texas wants “testing and treatment.”

* Even though they don’t work against Omicron — according to Regeneron, the company that makes it.