Covid boosters: Get your reading glasses

If you’re making a vaccine booster to replace an older booster, it’s important that they look different, right?

If you agreed, that’s because you have common sense: New booster, new package, less chance of error.

Meanwhile, at a couple of multinational, multi-billion-dollar drug companies…

Pfizer-BioNTech’s updated booster for people 12 and up comes in vials that have a gray cap with gray labeling — the same color scheme as its original vaccine, which is still being used for people’s primary vaccinations.

Moderna’s updated booster for adults comes in vials that have a dark blue cap with gray labeling; its vaccine vials for children 6 through 11 — which contains the drugmaker’s original formulation — have the same dark blue cap.

Gonorrhea treatment update

For treating gonorrhea, ceftriaxone good; ceftriaxone plus azithromycin bad.

A new study out of the University of Washington backs up a 2020 CDC decision to remove azithromycin from its treatment recommendation. Using azithromycin, they found, increases the risk of developing resistant gonorrhea — not in a theoretical way, but in the real world .

Adding azithromycin to the treatment plan seemed like a good idea at the time — the idea was “preserving the efficacy of ceftriaxone ‘for as long as possible and until new antimicrobials are available’.” But now the cure is worse than the disease, so to speak.

Will Buzz end for you?

If you’re getting GPhA Buzz as a GPhA member (as opposed to bribing Andrew), and you haven’t renewed your membership, you’re about to lose your daily Buzz!

That’s the word from on high: After a bit of a grace period, non-members will be removed from the mailing list and their phone numbers given to the people looking to talk to you about your car’s extended warranty^*.

So if you haven’t renewed your GPhA membership yet (it expired August 31), do it today. Click below, go to GPhA.org/renew, or reach out to Mary Ritchie at mritchie@gpha.org or (404) 419-8115.

* We’re kidding ^†.
^† Or are we?

Two kinds of obesity

There isn’t just obesity. There are (say scientists at Michigan-based Van Andel Institute) two distinct kinds. And one of them has a surprising twist.

In short, the first type of obesity is simple: It’s “characterized by greater fat mass.” But the second is “characterized by both greater fat mass and lean muscle mass.” Both show up in humans of all ages.

The second type, the found, is associated with inflammation and higher insulin levels and all the health issues those can cause. But that’s not the weird part.

The weird part: People who have that second type? It’s purely by chance — or, rather, “epigenetically triggerable.” Nurture, not nature. In fact, one identical twin might get it and the other might not, “with no gradient between them.” (That’s not speculation; they actually examined identical twins.)

Takeaways: First, BMI is bogus, “because it doesn’t account for underlying biological differences.” Second, treating obesity and its effects is more complex. We need “more precise ways to diagnose and treat obesity and associated metabolic disorders.”

The second type?

The Bavarians respond

Yesterday we told you about a Dutch study that found the current smallpox vaccine does bupkis for monkeypox.

Now Bavarian Nordic, maker of the vaccine, is saying nein nein nein! In fact, its study found the vaccine works just great — it “induced durable neutralizing antibody responses in healthy volunteers”. Obviously world governments should buy it — and buy it by the bucket.

BN also says that, contrary to the Dutch study, the vaccine also boosted the antibody response of people who had received the older generation of smallpox vaccines “in the distant past^*”.

Who to believe?

* Today I learned that I was born in “the distant past.”

Perspective (and math)

US monkeypox deaths jumped 50% Tuesday with the passing of a patient in California, bringing the nationwide death toll to three.

Irisin news

Adding it: Preventing Parkinson’s?

Endurance exercise can alleviate some Parkinson’s symptoms — that’s been known for a while. But why? The answer could be irisin, according to Johns Hopkins researchers; it’s released into the blood during endurance exercise.

The Hopkins folks found that, when treated with irisin, mice engineered to have Parkinson’s-like symptoms “had no muscle movement deficits.” The thinking is that the irisin breaks up the proteins that can clump in the brain, killing the cells that produce dopamine; that cell death triggers Parkinson’s. Break up the clumps, save the cells.

“If irisin’s utility pans out, we could envision it being developed into a gene or recombinant protein therapy.”

Removing it: Helping cancer patients?

People with advanced cancer often suffer from severe muscle loss and weakness — cachexia. It happens because the body starts converting white fat (which stores energy) into brown fat (which burns it).

For someone looking to lose weight, that’s good. For cancer patients, not so much.

But it could have an Achilles heel: irisin.

Indiana University researchers found that the fat-conversion process needs the hormone irisin, and irisin needs a protein called FNDC5, which is coded by, conveniently, a single gene.

They blocked that FNDC5 gene (in mice), the protein wasn’t produced, irisin wasn’t produced, and cachexia never set in. Well well well.

But one big problem: It only worked in male mice. So … an interesting breakthrough, but plenty more research is obviously needed.

The long-term blood sugar risk

People with diabetes are, as you know, at risk of developing eye and kidney complications.

But now Swedish researchers have found a simple way to determine who’s most at risk.

Simply put, if they can keep their blood sugar below 53 mmol/mol (7%), they have little risk of those complications. But the longer they stay above that level, the higher the risk — and notably, that ‘safe’ number drops over time, so even 53 is too high to keep for, say, 40 years.

Captain Obvious knows 1+7 = 17^*

“Concussions at school may affect academic performance.”

* And how Eisenhower and the Rough Riders crossed the Delaware in the Spanish-American War