Not good enough

The latest FDA Report on The State of Pharmaceutical Quality (PDF) has an eyebrow-raising number: More than a third of samples checked for quality — 35% — weren’t compliant. And that’s a big jump.

In FY2020, only 16% of the samples tested were non-compliant. Throughout FY2021, that number increased by approximately 2.19 times to 35%.

The good(ish) news is that there’s a reason — the pandemic rush to produce meds and hand sanitizer. “Covid-19 drugs composed 25% of the non-compliant samples. Additionally, hand sanitizers amounted to 19%, while opioids accounted for 0%.”

Step up and be a leader

There are still a couple of slots open for the 2022 class of LeadershipGPhA. This is the training ground for the men and women who’ll be helping set the direction of pharmacy in Georgia.

Don’t just read about changes to your practice, your employer, or your patients. Be part of the team at the steering wheel.

Get info about the program and apply at GPhA.org/leadershipgpha. Or just hope for the best.

This year’s kids’ flu shots

The American Academy of Pediatrics has released its recommendations for flu shots for the kids. Essentially, it’s 620 words about how the flu is bad, shots are good, but sadly not everyone gets them. Then it gets to the important stuff, like new strains.

What’s probably of most interest to you is the table of which ages should get which vaccine — Afluria, Fluarix, FluLaval, Fluzone, etc. — and how much of it.

The vaccine formulations available for children are unchanged from last season, except the age indication for the cell culture-based inactivated influenza vaccine (IIV) Flucelvax Quadrivalent has been lowered to 6 months and older (previously indicated for 2 years and older), providing one more option for young children.

The boosters are coming! (To arms! To arms!)

The Omicron-specific Covid boosters are arriving en masse this week, according to US health officials.

By the end of this week, 90% of Americans will live within five miles (8 km) of sites carrying updated vaccines, U.S. health secretary Xavier Becerra said.

The boosters will of course be free, and getting one with a flu shot is a good idea.

As for the future, the official rhetoric is now ‘We’ll probably just need boosters from now on’ … at least “in the absence of a dramatically different variant.”

Bots are breaking into pharmacies

A cybersecurity company has found that thousands of bots — computer programs that act like humans — have been using stolen credentials to log into accounts of major online pharmacies to steal prescription meds from real patients.

People often use the same password on multiple websites, so when it’s stolen from one, bots will try that same username/password combo on other sites. Like pharmacies’.

When they find a match, they can sell that access for big bucks to illicit drug dealers: “Wanna buy an XYZ Pharmacy account that has oxycodone?”

A criminal would log in to an account, initiate a fill, select the pharmacy at which they want to pick it up, then have someone collect it for them that’s not the intended customer.

So, which “major pharmacies” are being targeted? The company won’t say, “but among them were the top 10 pharmacies in the world.”

Juul takes another big hit

E-cig maker Juul continues to pay the price for marketing an addictive drug to kids. After an earlier payout to Arizona, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Washington, it’s now reached an “agreement in principle” to pay $440 million to 33 more states — yes, including Georgia — as a settlement for marketing high-nicotine vapes to kids.

It ain’t over, though. Juul is still facing lawsuits from nine other states, plus hundreds of personal suits by teenagers and others who say they became addicted to the company’s products.

A new pathway for pain treatment

Treating chronic pain is usually about trying to make life a little better; as one Austrian researcher put it, “often ineffective palliative treatments.” Opioids can help, but (as you might have heard) there are some issues with those.

Molecular biologists at the Austrian Academy of Sciences have made a bit of a breakthrough. They found that sensory neurons produce a metabolite called BH4, which is a driver of at least some kinds of chronic pain.

“The concentrations of BH4 correlated very well with the pain intensity. So, we naturally thought that this was a great pathway to target.”

But why make a new drug when there are a zillion existing ones? They screened 1,000 of them, and bingo! It turns out that fluphenazine — the antipsychotic — blocks the BH4 pathway and stops the pain. And not only that, it requires a very low dose … at least in mice.

Weird bonus: That BH4 pathway is also connected to lung cancers, meaning they’ve opened up a research opportunity there, too.

With drug news, choose your source

Yet another reason not to get your news from social media. As Forbes reports, according to mixed martial artist fighter Jake Shields, “the National institute [sic] of health added Ivermectin to the list of covid treatment [sic].”

No, no it didn’t. And yet, that was retweeted more than 15,000 times (although to be fair, many of those were probably laughing at him).

In unrelated news

Australian neuroscientists reported in a new study that “Repeated Concussions Can Thicken the Skull”.