Et tu, antiviral?

Covid is on the decline, and now we can all breathe a sigh of relief, knowing th—

Oh, you have got to be kidding.

In an unexpected twist from this season’s writers, it seems that sotrovimab, the antiviral used to treat Covid-19, is causing treatment-resistant mutations of the virus to emerge.

“We discovered that the virus that causes COVID-19 can develop mutations within the patient several days after sotrovimab treatment, which reduces the effectiveness of this treatment by greater than 100-fold.”

So far the mutated versions haven’t spread beyond the treatment clinics, but heck, it’s only March.

Caring in your heart, certificate on your wall

Medication therapy management — it’s one of the best ways you can care for your patients (and it’s a potential revenue stream, too).

A big step to providing MTM, though, is making sure you’re giving— and getting — the most you can. Patients will appreciate that, not to mention the lovely certificate on your wall.

Learn how to provide the best MTM you can when GPhA presents, “APhA’s Delivering Medication Therapy Management Services: A Certificate Training Program for Pharmacists.” There are even two dates available!

Sunday, March 27, 2022 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

=or=

Sunday, September 18, 2022 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Live via Zoom

Click here to get the details, see the instructors, and register!

Making quitting easier

Smoking and heavy drinking often go together, and when they do it’s even harder to get someone to quit cigarettes. (For one, alcohol makes the ‘reward’ from smoking even more acute.)

A treatment that works, it seems, is a one-two punch: nicotine replacement and varenicline (aka Chantix). A University of Chicago neuroscientist and team found that adding the varenicline worked much better than nicotine replacement alone.

• Nicotine replacement alone: 27.9% of the participants quit after 12 weeks
• Nicotine replacement plus varenicline: 44.3% of participants had quit

And a bonus side effect: reduced drinking — to the tune of 25-whopping-percent. (Weirdly, this was true with an without the varenicline.)

A better UTI treatment

Treating recurring urinary tract infections is simple: low-dose maintenance antibiotics. But Australian researchers think they’ve found a better alternative, and one that won’t contribute to antibiotic resistance: Koala dung. No, no — it’s methenamine hippurate, the urinary antiseptic.

Testing over a year on 240 women with recurrent, uncomplicated UTIs found that methenamine hippurate treatment was statistically “non-inferior” to using antibiotics. The researchers’ main caveat: They didn’t compare the treatment to specific antibiotics. Yet.

Nail in that coffin

A federal bankruptcy judge has approved the now-it’s-$6 billion settlement between the Sackler family and a long list of states, cities, tribes, and towns that suffered from the opioid crisis — a crisis that the family had absolutely nothing to do with, no sirree.

While they’re shielded from further civil liability, criminal cases are not off the table.

And the Sackler’s victims got their day in court — two dozen were allowed to speak in front of three members of the family. Per the AP:

“I hope you hear our names in your dreams. I hope you hear the screams of the families who find their loved ones dead on the bathroom floor. I hope you hear the sirens. I hope you hear the heart monitor as it beats along with a failing pulse.”

Flu news

Early data shows that this year’s flu vaccine is barely effective — just 16%, which falls within the margin of error. (The H3N2 strain is notorious for evading vaccines.) On the other hand, all that mask wearing has once again kept the season mild, and the peak is behind us … hopefully.

Bad chemical, worse virus

PFAS — nasty chemicals in a lot of consumer products and manufacturing processes — can interfere with the immune system (not to mention cause cancer and kidney disease). There are thousands of PFAS chemicals, and they’re slowly being restricted, phased out, or banned. And now the first studies have shown that, not surprisingly…

Higher levels of exposure to toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” may increase the likelihood of Covid-19 infection, more serious symptoms and death.

Fun fact: They last forever and “are estimated to be in about 97% of Americans’ blood.”

Midgely’s legacy

Do you know an idiot? Maybe you can blame Thomas Midgely. Because it seems that almost half of Americans alive today had enough childhood exposure to exhaust from the leaded gasoline he invented to lose “a collective 824 million IQ points.”

Duke and Florida State researchers found that…

As of 2015, more than 170 million Americans (more than half of the U.S. population) had clinically concerning levels of lead in their blood when they were children, likely resulting in lower IQs and putting them at higher risk for other long-term health impairments.

And if you think losing a few IQ points isn’t a big deal, the authors note that it’s enough to shift someone from ‘below average’ to ‘intellectual disability.’

* And also the genius who gave us CFCs and the ozone hole — a “one-man environmental disaster”

Captain Obvious is keeping his on in public for now

“Masking In K-12 Schools Significantly Reduces Covid-19 Among Staff And Students”

[In Arkansas], Districts that had “full” mask requirements […] had an estimated 23% reduction in cases compared with districts without mask requirements, a benefit that was observed for both students and staff members.

Test me like one of your French ants, Jack

Dogs can detect cancer, Covid, and who-knows-what other diseases. But they’re so big. French researchers have an alternative: ants.

Yep, they’ve trained ants to detect cancer cells by smell. “[I]ndividual ants need only a few training trials to learn, memorize, and reliably detect the odor of human cancer cells,” they wrote.

Our findings suggest that using ants as living tools to detect biomarkers of human cancer is feasible, fast, and less laborious than using other animals.