We totally screwed up

Region 11 — you folks in the Augusta area — we left you off the list of region meetings yesterday. Mea culpa.

You are having your fall Region Meeting on Thursday, September 28 at 6:30 pm at the Bonefish Grill in Augusta.

As a bonus, we asked our favorite AI image generator to imagine what it might look like^*. This is (seriously) what it came up with:

We can’t promise it will be that, um, interesting, but it’s sure to be a great time.

Side note: Apparently, as far as AI is concerned, any horizontal image of a dinner party is going to be inspired by DaVinci; here are some other examples.

We’re sorry, Moultrie-area folks

In the same post where we left off region 11, we forgot to remove region 2. Unfortunately, region 2’s meeting has been cancelled — sorry for any confusion.

^* “Pharmacists from Augusta Georgia having a fun dinner party”

Free Covid tests are coming back

Starting this coming Monday, people will be able to once again order free Covid-19 tests from covidtests.gov. The downside: They won’t be mailed till December. But, says the feds, some existing “expired” tests may not have actually expired.

Welch does it yet again

A big GPhA Buzz high five fist bump for GPhA member Lindsey Welch, named a UGA Women’s Leadership Fellow — “a select group of current faculty and administrators with an opportunity to develop leadership skills while gaining a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities confronting higher education.”

(Oh, yeah, and she was already named UGA Faculty Advisor of the Year — twice — GPhA Faculty Member of the Year, and she serves on the board of the Georgia Pharmacy Foundation.)

One inflammation raises another’s risk

If you have patients treating atopic dermatitis, here’s a warning for them: They’ve got a much greater risk of an inflammatory bowel disease — either ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease.

Penn researchers found that adults with atopic dermatitis have a 34% increased risk of developing new-onset IBD, and children’s risk goes up a 44%. In fact, with kids there’s a difference between the risks for ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease — there’s a much greater risk of developing the latter.

They aren’t quite sure why this is the case, but they speculate it might have to do with “chronic inflammation, and the dysfunction in the skin and gut barrier respectively.”

“Those need to be explored further to uncover both what’s happening at a microscopic level and what proteins or structures could be targeted to treat one or both conditions.”

Side note: Kids dealing with severe atopic dermatitis are best treated with methotrexate, according to a new British study.

The study found that ciclosporin works faster and reduces disease severity more at 12 weeks but was more expensive, whereas methotrexate was significantly cheaper and led to better objective disease control after 12 weeks and off therapy.

Today’s teeny-tiny study….

…found that creatine supplements — the stuff that body builders take — might also help alleviate the symptoms of long Covid. But the Serbian researchers who did the study only used 12 patients, so, of course the mantra applies: More research is needed.

Sinusitis and kids — two good options

If you’ve tossed and turned at night wondering which antibiotic for pediatric acute sinusitis is better — amoxicillin or amoxicillin-clavulanate — then you can get back to those flying dreams and hanging on the beach with Paul Rudd.

The folks at Brigham and Women’s Hospital did a study involving 200,000 kids and concluded there’s no real difference between the two.

The why is actually interesting: The clavulanate helped target beta-lactamase–producing bacteria. These days, between vaccines and antibiotic resistance, the biology of what causes the disease has shifted so the clavulanate doesn’t make as much of a difference.

Proposed mask guidelines anger health workers

Medical workers are shocked and a bit peeved at a draft proposal from a CDC advisory committee that said in most cases cheap surgical masks were just as good as N95 masks, despite what looks like serious flaws in the data.

It was going to recommend that hospitals not require N95 masks except when dealing with uncommon or pandemic-level pathogens (i.e., not endemic, as Covid is now). Virologists pointed out, though, that you don’t choose protection based on how common something is, but by how it’s transmitted. And Covid is transmitted by air.

In the face of widespread pushback, the committee has postponed making its recommendation, perhaps to get input from people who know more about these issues. As one hygienist put it:

“If they end up codifying these standards of care, it will have a disastrous impact on patient safety and impact our ability to respond to future health crises.”