Latest Covid guess

As winter arrives, Covid cases will rise but still fall far short of last year’s peak. It also won’t result in as many deaths as previous spikes. That’s the conclusion of the folks at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation after spinning the Wheel of Covid Prediction.

IHME estimates that daily infections in the United States will increase by a third to more than a million, driven by students back in schools and cold weather-related indoor gatherings.

Correction: An earlier report said that the U of W used a roll of dice to make the prediction, rather than the Wheel of Covid Prediction. We regret the error.

Shout out to seven UGA students (and one prof)

A GPhA Buzz shout-out to the UGA student pharmacists who presented posters at ACCP’s Global Conference on clinical pharmacy in San Francisco (in no particular order): Shelby Webb, Kelsea Mabie, Megha Patel, Lara Lindsay, Monica Acharya, Ann Irvin, and Dayana Pimentel-Dominguez.

And also to UGA associate professor Rebecca Stone, who was chaperone, co-author, mentor, and advisor to the students. Nice job, Dawgs!

Skin is in (for a month, at least)

Mom was wrong when she said “Every month is healthy skin month.” In fact, it’s just November.

As dermatologists across the country prepare to celebrate, they want to remind everyone that skin care is more than just moisturizers and hydrocortisone, while slipping in their slogan, “The skin is the body’s largest organ.”

New psoriasis treatments

New drugs are out that can treat psoriasis — non-steroids, longer-lasting treatments, and systemic biologics. They can work better, but often the older drugs are just fine, especially when you look at the prices. (When $1,300 a month is considered “much more affordable,” you might want to consider marrying a Norwegian.)

Dry shampoo recall

Unilever has recalled a bunch of its dry shampoos sold under a bunch of brand names: Bed Head, Dove, Nexxxxxus, Suave, Tresemmé, “due to potentially elevated levels of benzene.”

As you probably remember from way back in high school, benzene is not something you want on your skin. Or, really, anywhere near you. There haven’t been any reports of problems, but the company wants to avoid lawsuits protect its customers with an abundance of caution.

OTC birth control approval delayed

The FDA said it’s delaying a decision by 90 days on whether to allow Perrigo’s prescription birth control drug Opill to become Perrigo’s OTC birth control drug Opill. The agency said it needs time to “review additional information requested from Perrigo related to the application.”

(Note: Yesterday we referred to this as HRA Pharma’s pill. HRA is an affiliate of Perrigo, so it’s the same thing.)

Better drugs for UTIs

For someone with a complicated urinary tract infection, out is piperacillin plus tazobactam, and in is efepime plus enmetazobactam. That’s the conclusion (published in the Journal of the American Medical Association) from Rutgers researchers after a phase 3 clinical trial.

Patients on the newer drugs were cured 79% of the time, compared to 58.9% taking conventional treatment.

[T]his drug combination also fights an often-dangerous category of bacterial illnesses caused by pathogens known as extended spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) infections […]. ESBL-producing bacteria can’t be killed effectively by many of the antibiotics conventionally used to treat infections, such as penicillins and cephalosporins.

GABA, GABA, hey!

Today’s potential Covid treatment comes out of UCLA: the amino acid GABA (aka gamma aminobutyric acid), they said, “reduced disease severity, viral load in the lungs, and death rates in SARS-CoV-2-infected mice.” And it’s available over the counter.

GABA receptors are in a couple of important places, including inflammatory immune cells and lung epithelial cells, making it “a theoretically appealing candidate for limiting the overreactive immune responses and lung damage due to coronavirus infection.”

Treated mice […] displayed reduced levels of virus in their lungs and changes in circulating immune signaling molecules, known as cytokines and chemokines, toward patterns that were associated with better outcomes in Covid-19 patients.

So why hasn’t this come out before? Follow the (lack of) money. “[T]here has been no pharmaceutical interest pursuing GABA therapy for Covid-19, presumably because it is not patentable and widely available as a dietary supplement.”

Monkeypox updates

Monkeybox deaths in the US have increased exponentially since we last reported on it. Now there are nine. (And almost 28,000 people are currently infected.)

That said, infections continue to decline — and health officials aren’t certain why. Their best guesses: behavioral changes (e.g., fewer sexual partners), seeking treatment sooner, and “immunity acquired through infections.” Or perhaps a combination.

The Long Read: Keeping Up with the Lit edition

How can a conscientious pharmacist keep up with all the latest news and research? Pharmacy Times offers some suggestions from a session at the American Society of Consultant Pharmacists 2022 Annual Meeting, “The Busy Clinician of Oz: Staying Up to Date with Literature, Guidelines, Oh My”.

(Good luck. Here at GPhA Buzz Research Headquarters, we currently track more than 35 pharma/health news sources, many of which track other sources. And we can barely keep up.)

Facepalm of the day

A wag of the finger to the folks at Medical News Today whose image — for a story on menopause hot flashes — was a woman in heels pushing a shopping cart (with red wheels).