The seven annoying symptoms of long Covid

We’re at the point where just about any chronic health issue after a Covid infection is considered “long Covid” — the reported list has 47 symptoms.

But Missouri University data scientists weren’t convinced. They wanted actual data, so they looked at the health records of more than 52,000 people, considering whether they had Covid, another respiratory infection, or neither. After cross-referencing the symptoms, they discovered not 47 but only seven symptoms that were consistently associated with long Covid.

As we know you’re curious, they are: fast-beating heart, hair loss, fatigue, chest pain, shortness of breath, joint pain, and obesity.

Technicians: Know your new CPE requirements

Starting on June 30, 2025, pharmacy technicians in Georgia will need to meet new CPE requirements to renew their biennial registrations.

You’ll be required to have at least 20 CPE hours to renew your license — but you’ll need to have at least 10 hours per year; i.e., you can’t cram it in all at once.

The first time you’ll need CPE is for your June 30, 2025 renewal.

• You’ll need to get 10 hours between July 1, 2023 and June 30, 2024.
• You’ll need another 10 hours between July 1, 2024 and renewal on June 30, 2025.

Awesome sauce: If you get more than 20 hours, you can roll over those extra hours into the next year!

(New technicians will have CPE requirements of zero, 10, or 20 hours based on their first registration month. It’s complicated.)

Of course, all existing requirements for pharmacy technicians — i.e., board approval — remain in place.

What to do, what to do

Start by creating an NABP eProfile if you don’t have one already, so you can track your CE credits using CPE Monitor (and print transcripts).

Look for CPE courses that are accredited by either ACPE or the Georgia Board of Pharmacy. (All GPhA’s CPEasy courses are accredited.) There are also PowerPak and other Web-based services that offer free or low-cost CPE.

Pay attention to GPhA announcements of new CPE courses. Most of them are available as webinars, many are on-demand, and there are new courses being offered all the time. (Did you know you can get a hour of CPE by learning the history of Coca-Cola?)

Just remember: No cramming — you need to spread your hours out over the two-year period!

Questions? Reach out to J. Ross Hays, CPhT, the chair of GPhA’s Academy of Pharmacy Technicians. He’s at apt@gpha.org.

ICYMI: Emergency to end in May

The Biden administration will finally end the Covid-19 public health emergency on May 11.

(What happens then? That’s a long read, but here you go.)

Café au lait keeps the inflammation away

Coffee is good for you, but now those shifty Danes say that coffee with milk might be even better.

It’s all about coffee’s polyphenols — the antioxidants that are part of what makes coffee healthy. But when you combine polyphenols with proteins like the ones found in milk, the result is really, really good for immune cells.

[A]s a polyphenol reacts with an amino acid, its inhibitory effect on inflammation in immune cells is enhanced.

And they mean significantly enhanced:

[I]mmune cells treated with the combination of polyphenols and amino acids were twice as effective at fighting inflammation as the cells to which only polyphenols were added.

Of course this is all in the lab, so, as always, further research (first in animals, then humans) is needed.

Court: J&J can’t two-step

Johnson & Johnson tried to limit the pain of those talcum powder lawsuits by spinning off those liabilities into a new company, then having that company declare bankruptcy — the “Texas Two-Step.” (Named because Texas law allows it.)

But now a federal appeals court has reversed a lower-court decision and told J&J it’s going to have to face the music sans spinoff.

Feds target Medicare Advantage fraud

A new CMS rule gets aggressive with Medicare Advantage audits. In short, it allows the agency to review a subset of a Medicare Advantage provider’s records, determine how much fraud it committed, and extrapolate that to all the provider’s billing since 2018.

In other words, if the subset showed the company overcharged by an average of 1 percent, the government would assume that it was overbilled by 1 percent on every patient since 2018.

Providers — for which Medicare Advantage is the most profitable product — aren’t happy, and they’re doing the “World Will End if This Happens” dance.

But supporters of the rule point out that it was originally planned to go back to 2011, so insurers should count their blessings … which include hundreds of millions of dollars taxpayers overpaid them.

If you’re overweight, at least get your vitamin A

The paper: “Vitamin A preserves cardiac energetic gene expression in a murine model of diet-induced obesity”

The news: “Vitamin A May Protect Heart from Some Effects of Obesity”

The finding: Mice who are both obese and vitamin-A deficient have “greater disruption to genes involved in heart function,” according to German researchers.

‘[T]the vitamin-deficient obese mice had repression of genes in the heart that are associated with extracting energy from fat, extracting energy from glucose, and the production of [ATP].’