So you want to give the monkeypox vaccine

Apparently a lot of pharmacists do — that’s what APhA (along with a whole bunch of other organizations*) told White House National Monkeypox Response Coordinator Robert Fenton and his HHS colleagues in a letter, “Request to amend the declaration of a monkeypox Public Health Emergency” (PDF).

“To ensure pharmacists are able to expand patient access as monkeypox testing, vaccine and therapeutic supplies increase, we urge you to proactively authorize pharmacists to order and administer monkeypox testing, vaccines and therapeutics.”

At some point pharmacists will simply be included in these efforts by default, and we won’t need to write letters every time there’s a need to get shots in arms. Till then, thank you, APhA et al.

* AACP, American Association of Psychiatric Pharmacists, ACP, American College of Clinical Pharmacy, Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy, American Society of Consultant Pharmacists, ASHP, Food Industry Association, Hematology/Oncology Pharmacy Association, Society of Infectious Diseases Pharmacists, NASPA, National Association of Specialty Pharmacy, NCPA

Is there a leader in you?

(Well let him out! Ha!) But seriously, here’s the deal:

LeadershipGPhA is how GPhA trains future pharmacy leaders — you know, the ones you read about who set the tone for the profession in Georgia.

1. It’s free if you qualify, but there are only eight spaces in each year’s class.
2. The academy is one weekend long, but the connections you make will help your career for a long time. A lonnnng time.
3. The program is a deep crash course that develops the leadership skills you’ll need to help set the tone for the pharmacy profession in Georgia.

The academy is October 21 – 23 at the Westin Perimeter North in Sandy Springs, and everything is provided free to the eight candidates chosen.

You are invited to apply if you:

• are a pharmacist member of GPhA;
• have practiced pharmacy for at least five years;
• exemplify honesty, integrity, and motivation to advance the profession of pharmacy in the state of Georgia.

If you want to help lead the profession, click here for details of LeadershipGPhA and apply today!

Electric brains do it faster

Drug discovery ain’t cheap, and those later-stage human trials are especially pricey, what with people wanting to be paid and all. Animal tests are good, but … I mean, look at their little faces!

What’s coming is a whole new level of computer testing — in vitro and in situ, meet in silico. Artificial intelligence is getting better, and getting better fast … to the point that computers can look at drugs (and humans) at the molecular level and tell us, “Yeah, this looks like it’ll work.”

Research has reached a point where computational power and understanding of biology allow highly specific predictions to be made on how a medicine will affect the human body.

Fun fact: AI is so good now that humans don’t teach computers anymore. We just build the teachers and no longer know how they do their jobs, just that their “students” seem to know what they’re doing. Creepy, huh? (Nifty video on the subject.)

Teens believe anything

Pro tip: If someone is about to give you health information, and they start with, “I saw on TikTok…,” feel free to laugh before they finish.

Unfortunately, teens don’t get the joke. A new study out of Slovakia’s Comenius University found that “41% of teenagers can’t tell the difference between true and fake online health messages.”

There are often “cues” in fake info: superlatives (“This will make you 400% better!), clickbait (“The most dangerous snack you’re eating”), grammar mistakes (“Bestly foodstuffs for you’re acnes”), authority appeal (“98% of doctors take this supplement”), and bold typeface.

The only one that was a red flag for teens? Clickbait.

“As adolescents are frequent users of the internet, we usually expect that they already know how to approach and appraise online information, but the opposite seems to be true.”

MMR mission creep (in a good way)

Another reason to get the MMR vaccine (besides making sure your kids don’t contract a horrific disease): It can reduce their risk of inflammatory bowel disease.

A study out of the University of Michigan found that “receiving at least one MMR vaccine dose was associated with a 21% lower risk of developing IBD compared with not getting vaccinated.” (It may also lower risk of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, but those results weren’t statistically significant.)

It’s okay to be prepared

Add a safety feature to a car and it also adds a bit of unsafe behavior. (Someone in an SUV with antilock brakes and 22 airbags won’t drive as carefully as someone in a ’63 Corvair.)

That’s why, when HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis hit the scene, people worried it would increase risky sexual behavior, and thus lead to an increase in bacterial STIs.

Forget guessing — the Aussies decided to find out. PrEP went nationwide there in January 2016, so it was easy to crunch the data. The result: After a brief uptick in STIs, the numbers dropped, and — and this is the big takeaway — have remained lower than before PrEP’s introduction … except for syphilis, which increased slightly possibly due to “changes in sexual networks following PrEP implementation.”

Interesting pot stats

When a state legalizes recreational marijuana, more people use it — that’s Captain Obvious territory. But researchers at the universities of Minnesota and Colorado teased out some interesting detail when looking at longer-term trends. They did it by looking at twins.

• Overall, people in states with legal pot used it 24% more frequently than those in ‘illegal’ states.
• But with identical twins, that drops to only a 20% rise — meaning “socioeconomic status, parental influences, and community norms” play a role.
• This is about frequency, not use. “[I]t is unlikely that legalization would cause those who abstained from marijuana before to pick up the habit.”
• In ‘legal’ states, cannabis use continues into adulthood rather than dropping off as people leave college, start families, and settle into stable jobs. “Interestingly,” the researchers said, “we saw escalation, not reduction, in adults.”

Quote of the Day

From “Clinicians React to Over-the-Counter Birth Control Possibility”:

“Accessing contraception over the counter could be a game changer for people who experience common barriers to accessing clinics. For example, this may help people who can’t get an appointment for several months, who don’t have a nearby clinician for care, who can’t get off work or school to attend a clinic appointment, who do not have transportation, who need additional privacy, [or] who prefer to self-manage their contraception.”
— Melissa Kottke, MD, associate professor in the Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics, Emory University

The Long Read: Teen Polypharm edition

When a teen has anxiety or depression, it’s one thing to use medication — it’s another to just throw pills at them. But too often, that’s the case.

Increasingly, anxious and depressed teens are using multiple, powerful psychiatric drugs, many of them untested in adolescents or for use in tandem.