Suit claims pharma paid terrorists

Did big pharma companies sponsor terrorism? We may soon know, as a lawsuit accusing them of just that is going forward. A federal appeals court has given the go-ahead to the suit, brought by staff sergeant Joshua Atchley and more than 100 other plaintiffs who “alleged that several massive pharmaceutical companies were making ‘corrupt payments’ to Iraq’s Ministry of Health in order to gain contracts.”

The gist: After Saddam Hussein’s government fell, a terrorist group a called Jaysh al-Mahdi took over the ministry charged with drug imports, and companies including AstraZeneca, J&J, Pfizer, and Roche paid that group to allow it to import drugs.

“Those payments [reads the complaint] aided and abetted terrorism in Iraq by directly financing an Iran-backed, Hezbollah-trained militia that killed or injured thousands of Americans.”

Bring a student to dinner (on us)

Pharmacists: We need you to share your experience with student pharmacists, and we’ll take you to dinner so you can do it in style.

Dinner With a Pharmacist is a food and networking evening, brought to you by GPhA’s Student Leadership Board — it’s at the 1818 Club in Duluth on March 11 from 5:30 – to 8:30 pm.

Dinner is free, your knowledge is priceless — but space is limited.

Inspire a student pharmacist and make a difference. Click here to sign up while there are still seats left!

Kiss kiss, bang bang

Sometimes a news story just screams, “Put this in Buzz!” In this case, British researchers have found that injections of the hormone kisspeptin (discovered in Hershey, Penn. (seriously)) can “boost sexual desire in men and women.”

When folks with low sexual desire received kisspeptin shots, areas of their brains charged with feeling sexual desire lit up on scans when they watched erotic videos.

The paper was published in JAMA Network Open. And you can bet that studies will be ongoing.

From the vitamin D files

…vs prediabetes

An analysis out of Tufts Medical Center of about 4,000 patients found that those who took vitamin D supplements (4,000 IU daily) had a 15 percent lower risk being newly diagnosed with diabetes.

There are some caveats. They didn’t consider the safety of taking that much vitamin D, and it was conducted on people already at high risk for diabetes. And “After the trial ended, approximately 30% of the participants’ glucose levels returned to their levels before the study.”

…and birth

Taking extra vitamin D during pregnancy — we’re talking 1,000 IU daily — seems like it might increase your chance of a natural delivery. And by “natural delivery,” the British researchers who did the study mean that it didn’t require assistance, e.g., a suction cup or forceps are to help deliver the baby. (There was no difference in the number of women who had C-sections.) They also had less blood loss.

What wasn’t taken into account was whether any of the women were vitamin D deficient.

…and asthma

For all the good vitamin D seems to do, one thing it can’t do is reduce the risk of asthma attacks. That’s the conclusion of healthcare data-review company^* Cochrane, in which British researchers who once thought supplementation could help, looked at newer data and now concluded the opposite.

When they compared patients who were assigned to take a vitamin D supplement with patients who were assigned to take a placebo, the researchers found no statistically significant difference in the number of people who experienced an asthma attack.

^* I can’t really come up with a better way to describe it.

The lymphatic system does what?

Apparently, it can make blood. Yep, that’s not just up to bone-marrow stem cells. An Aussie-led team of biologists was investigating the causes of lymphoedema when it found that “the same gene that controls the development of lymphatic vessels also controls the production of blood cells.”

What does this mean? Just hold your wallabies — I mean, they just discovered this, so give ’em a chance to do some more research.

Everyone’s getting into healthcare

Amazon, Mark Cuban, Dollar General — they’re all jumping on the money train that is healthcare. Now you can add Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify. He’s launching Neko Health in Europe.

Neko Health will offer advanced full-body scanning to help doctors find and prevent disease. It’s launching after four years of research and development — and hopes to be a gamechanger for Europe’s beleaguered^* healthcare systems.

^* Aside from Britain’s mess, it’s not clear how the rest of Europe is “beleaguered,” but we wish him well regardless.

Elsewhere: Mushrooms Down Under edition

Australia has become the first country — heck, the first continent — to approve the medicinal use of both MDMA and psilocybin for some mental health conditions.

Starting July 1, Australia’s FDA-equivalent Therapeutic Goods Administration “will permit specifically-authorised psychiatrists to prescribe MDMA […] for PTSD and psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms, for treatment-resistant depression.”

(And no, not everyone is thrilled about it.)