Moderna’s better booster

Moderna has updated its Covid-19 vaccine booster to a bivalent version that (it says) produces a stronger response against the Omicron variant. They’ve given it the memorable name “mRNA-1273.214,” and it’s the company’s current frontrunner for the fall 2022 season.

Will Pfizer follow suit? The FDA’s vaccine team will meet June 28 to decide what to recommend for back to Petri dish school season.

What, me worry?

The unfriendly skies

Monkeypox isn’t only spread through close physical contact — apparently it can also be airborne. The CDC is recommending mask-wearing while around potential carriers (e.g., people who didn’t wear a mask while around a potential carrier). The good news is that transmission that way is still rare.

A new coronavirus

Swedish researchers have discovered a new coronavirus that seems common in the country’s bank voles. They’ve named it the Grimsö Virus, and it’s from the same family as SARS-CoV-2 and MERS.

Of course the chances of it jumping to humans is just about zero, so there’s nothing to worry about. No siree.

Order your antivirals from DPH

Looking to get your hands on some Covid-19 antivirals? Georgia’s DPH would like to give ’em to you, free, of course.

If you’re not already part of the federal retail pharmacy program, there’s a simple form to fill out. It’s that easy.

Questions or concerns? Email the the Covid-19 therapeutics team at covid19-therapeutics@dph.ga.gov

Filling the knowledge gap

“Information on the association between tea drinking and semen quality is limited,” said Chinese scientists, and they were not going to let that stand. To the sperm bank!

It took 15 months, 1,385 men, and 6,466 sperm samples, but they came up with an answer: Yes, being a regular tea drinker, especially over the long term, improves both sperm concentration and total sperm count. (It’s the frequency of tea drinking that matters, not the strength of the tea.) And if you want the most motile sperm, go for green tea.

Contraceptives reduce suicide

Women who take hormonal contraceptives are, it seems, less likely to attempt suicide. That’s the result of a Finnish study — one that was expected to replicate the findings of a 2017 paper that found the opposite.

Instead, this latest data — which comes from the health records of 587,000 women — found “that individuals not taking contraceptives had a 37 percent increased risk of attempting suicide.” And for those over 19, the difference is even greater.

So why the difference from then till now? The previous study, done by a group of those shifty Danes, looked at younger women using hormonal contraception for the first time. (They had to turn 15 during the study.) Because younger women are more likely to attempt suicide, that may have skewed the results.

The politics of health

Trigger warning: This is a story about politics — but it’s interesting, relevant, and worth thinking about. (And it’s come up over and over in my medical news feeds.) In a perfect world your reaction would be “Let’s fix this,” but it’s not a perfect world. So regardless of your opinion, I hope you won’t send angry emails.

The gist: Going through voting and mortality data over the past 20 years, researchers from Harvard, Houston Methodist, Washington University, and Dow University (Pakistan) found that…

[P]eople in counties* that voted for Republican presidential candidates were more like to die prematurely than those in counties that voted for Democratic candidates, and the gap has grown sixfold over the last two decades. (Emphasis ours.)

This is a recent phenomenon: “[I]n 2001, there was almost no difference in death rates between Democratic and Republican areas […] though now Republican rural counties experience much higher rates of death.”

There was no particular cause of death that stood out; it was across the board. And there’s no single reason for it — it’s a combination of health policy and behavior.

Above link is to an editorial by the lead author; here’s the paper itself.

* It doesn’t matter whom the people themselves voted for, just the county they live in.

Elsewhere

 

South Dakota: Don’t put up roadblocks

Voters in South Dakota voted overwhelmingly to reject a ballot measure designed to derail Medicaid expansion there. (To be clear: They haven’t voted to expand it, they voted not to make it harder to expand.)

California: If you want it done right…

California is looking to start its own generic drug company, with making insulin at the top of the list — “the goal is to dramatically slash insulin prices and make it available to ‘millions of Californians’.”

The state is going to investigate what it will cost to work with a manufacturer to make and distribute insulin — it’s not clear whether such a program can actually save money. And possibly the biggest roadblock: PBMs.

To be successful, California — and the company it partners with — must navigate a complicated pharmaceutical distribution system that relies not only on drug manufacturers but also middleman companies that work hand in hand with health insurers.