Sorry we missed this yesterday

We mentioned that generic versions of Tamiflu were in short supply, but we missed the fact that there’s the Strategic National Stockpile which includes Tamiflu — and HHS is tapping into it to relieve the shortages.

In case you’re wondering about The Strategic National Stockpile…

It’s stored in 12 secret and guarded locations around the country and contains (among other things) “push packs” that include broad-spectrum antibiotics, emergency medicines, IV fluids and kits, airway equipment, bandages, vaccines, antitoxins, and ventilators, “including 300 million smallpox treatment courses and enough anthrax vaccines to handle a three-city incident” as well as “nerve agent antidotes to help in the event of a nerve agent attack or industrial accident.”

You should live to be 120

A big shout-out to owner (and GPhA member) Steven Purvis all the folks at Blue Ridge Pharmacy in, obviously, Blue Ridge, with just celebrated its 120th anniversary!

The pharmacy has a long history, starting as Earnest Crawford’s Central Drug Store back in 1902^* before moving a couple of times and changing its name to Rexall Pharmacy under owners Clarence Fergason and his son, Bill.

Fergason sold it to employee N.L. Prather and Prather’s friend W.A. Walden, Sr., who in 1945 built the pharmacy at its current location. Eventually their sons — Bill and Bill (seriously, what’s with all the Bills?) — took over, running the pharmacy until 2009.

Today Blue Ridge Pharmacy is still called “Rexall” by some of the old-time residents, and it’s owned by Steven Purvis, but it isn’t much different than it was in the ’40s … except for the lack of a soda fountain, and, you know, modern meds. Oh, and Bill Prather is still active as a member of the Georgia Board of Pharmacy — and of course GPhA.

The history comes from Kathy Thompson’s book Blue Ridge, but any errors in summarizing are mine.

^* Perspective: Teddy Roosevelt was president; a land speed record of 74 mph was set that year; people had yet to reach the South Pole

Great news from China

Despite Covid re-raging throughout the country, it reported zero — none, nil, zilch — Covid deaths on Wednesday. How is that possible? By moving the goalposts, i.e., changing what’s considered a Covid death!

In the rest of the world, if you die from Covid or a complication of Covid, that’s a Covid death. But China’s policy is not: Never blame Covid when you can blame some other underlying condition. In China, you only die of Covid if you die from respiratory failure and have no other medical issues.

Psst: Omicron affects the lungs much less than previous variants.

When the gut biome turns traitor

Some patients who suffer a C. difficile infection end up with recurrent infections, but it wasn’t clear what separates the repeaters from the once-and-done-ers.

Now we may know, thanks to UVa researchers. And you guessed it from the headline: It’s in the gut biome — specifically, Enterococci bacteria. Antibiotics allow resistant strains of enterococci to flourish, and those produce a couple of amino acids (leucine and ornithine if you must know) that beef up C. diff. and make it harder to kill.

They don’t have a treatment, but in this case knowing the enemy ( 350,000 Americans a year get C. diff. infections) is kind of a big step.

Rite Aid looking at more closures

After a quarterly loss of more than $67 million (due to “a reduction in COVID vaccine and testing revenue”), Rite Aid is considering closing more of its remaining 2,324 stores in the coming year; it closed 145 of them in 2022.

A new kind of cancer killer

Japanese researchers have found a new way to kill cancer cells, taking advantage of the fact that some cancers overproduce microRNA molecules. They created artificial strands of DNA^* that connect to and unravel that excess miRNA, create long DNA strands, and trigger the immune system to attack.

So far it’s been effective — in the lab — against cervical, triple-negative breast, and malignant melanoma cancers.

“Next, we will aim for drug discovery based on the results of this research.”

^* Not scary at all

Good news for (some) diabetics

Diabetics who take metformin are much less likely to ever need a joint replacement. So discovered a team of Chinese, Taiwanese, and Australian researchers after analyzing data from almost 70,000 patients.

“We found that metformin use in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus was associated with a significantly reduced risk of joint replacement, suggesting a potential therapeutic effect of metformin in patients with osteoarthritis.

The obvious next step: testing metformin in non-diabetics — perhaps patients at higher risk of osteoarthritis.

Speaking of osteoarthritis…

If you have a disease model you’re worried about getting hand osteoarthritis, good news out of Oxford University. Researchers there found that talarozole — once a potential acne drug — can prevent those models from getting hand osteoarthritis.

Apparently people who get severe versions of the condition have a variant of a gene that means they have low levels of retinoic acid. And what d’ya know — talarozole increases retinoic acid.

Of course, just because it works in models doesn’t mean it’ll work for humans, but luckily talarozole’s previous life meant it’s got a solid safety profile, so human trials are already underway.

The Long Read: Long Arm of the Law edition

Our Friends the Police would never use Covid-tracking and -surveillance tools or rules for anything other than what they were meant for, would they? Of course they would.

[Around the world], authorities used these technologies and data to halt travel for activists and ordinary people, harass marginalized communities and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools.