Ozempic ripples continue

Semaglutide drugs are still relatively new, and already Walmart is reporting a “slight pullback in the overall basket” of food purchases, and snack companies are rethinking their products. Could smaller Slim Jims be on the horizon?

But not everyone is freaking out.

[One exec] said snack companies “are talking about making smaller pack sizes and things like that, and that’s kind of nutty thinking because it’s just too early to know how much it’s going to impact consumer behavior.”

Speaking of semaglutide….

Novo Nordisk stopped its test of semaglutide for chronic kidney disease early because the results were so good. That trial “is looking at whether semaglutide can stall progression of CKD and curb the risk of death from kidney failure and cardiovascular issues.”

I guess it can. The full results will be released in the first half of 2024, after which you can assume Novo will apply for a new label for Wegovy.

A different kind of Covid vax

A new, non-mRNA Covid vaccine has passed its phase 1 trials. The interesting bits: It’s a nasal vaccine using a live-attenuated (i.e., weakened) virus, meaning storage and transportation are easier. And it works differently:

The idea was to produce an immune response to the entire virus rather than the frequently mutating spike protein. This could potentially provide broader protection against variants, the researchers said.

Unexpected opioid side effect

Odd finding: Of 60,000 patients admitted to hospital in Rhode Island, 5% carried a nasty bug in their guts: vancomycin-resistant Enterococci. But of those, 16% hadn’t taken any kind of antimicrobial in the past year. Something else was afoot.

That something else, according to Brown University researchers, was opioids. When they crunched the numbers, they found that individuals exposed to opioids faced a nearly four-fold higher risk of harboring antibiotic-resistant bacteria in their intestines.

Why? It could be that opioids create an environment in the digestive system that those bacteria find particularly hospitable.

Walgreens’ bottom line hit by lawsuit, less vaccination

Thanks in large part to the double whammy of Covid vaccines sales dropping and having to shell out $4.8 billion for its role in the opioid crisis, Walgreens Boots Alliance reported a $180 million loss in Q4, bringing its total loss in 2023 to more than $3.1 billion with a B.

But don’t you worry — not only is that a smaller loss than Q4 last year, the company is planning big cost cuts and forecasting a profitable 2024.

Turning and Alzheimer’s

People with Alzheimer’s have trouble turning, it seems^*. A study by neuroscientists at University College London found that…

… people with early Alzheimer’s consistently overestimated the turns on the route and showed increased variability in their sense of direction.

^* No, we’re not going to make a joke about Florida drivers who leave their turn signals on.

The Long Read: Saving the Crabs edition

Horseshoe crab blood is used to make limulus amebocyte lysate (LAL), which is used to guarantee that IV drugs are free of endotoxins.

Producing LAL requires harvesting horseshoe crabs from oceans and beaches, draining up to 30% of their blood in a laboratory and returning the live crabs to the ocean. There’s dispute about how many crabs die in the process.

Death is bad for the crabs, and also for the birds that feed on their eggs … and so on, up the food chain.

That might change. (Not the part about death — that’s still bad for the crabs.) Lab-made replacements for LAL exist, and even the LAL companies have them. And next year USP might move these synthetic products from “alternative” status to full approval, and that could be the spark to get drug makers to give up their crab-draining ways.

Weird science

Buy a home. Renting, apparently, makes you age faster, according to data from an Australian study.

The negative health impacts of renting were shown to be greater than those of experiencing unemployment or being a former smoker.

Correlation/causation: It could be that people who rent have lower incomes overall and thus age faster because of that.