Scam alert

In case you haven’t heard, the Georgia Board of Pharmacy is reminding pharmacists and technicians that the board will never, ever call and ask you for money. Scammers, on the other hand, will do just that — and even fake BoP phone numbers (so don’t trust your Caller ID).

TODAY is the deadline for GPhA awards nominations

That’s right — today, January 15, is the deadline to submit a nomination and tell us about an extraordinary person or two. Help choose the best of the best in Georgia pharmacy — with the 2025 awards being presented with both pomp and circumstance at the Georgia Pharmacy Convention on Amelia Island, Fla.

What awards, you ask? The details are at GPhA.org/awards, but here’s the list:

• The Bowl of Hygeia: You know it or you don’t — it’s among the most prestigious awards in pharmacy and the only one with a Wikipedia page.
• Larry L. Braden Meritorious Service Award: GPhA’s highest honor
• Distinguished Young Pharmacist Award (“Young” meaning in the profession for less than a decade)
• Excellence in Innovation Award for Pharmacy Practice
• Faculty Member of the Year
• Jim Bartling Student Pharmacist of the Year (P3 or P4)
• Pharmacy Technician of the Year

All these nominations come from you, our members. That’s what gives them meaning. And it starts now.

Visit our awards page at GPhA.org/awards for more information on award criteria, and to make your nominations. Remember: The deadline for submissions is TODAY, January 15, 2025.

Aetna sues drugmakers

The insurance company is suing Novartis, Pfizer, Teva Pharmaceutical, and others (Actavis, Dr. Reddy’s, Glenmark, Sandoz, and more) claiming they “conspired to overcharge the insurer, consumers, and the federal government for generic drugs.”

The complaint, filed Dec. 31, claims the drugmakers communicated secretly at trade conferences or through phone calls, beginning in 2012, to determine the market share, prices and bids of certain drugs. If communication was in writing, they destroyed the evidence, Aetna claimed.

This suit is in addition to similar action filed by states (some of which have been settled), as well as Department of Justice and congressional investigations.

PBMs (still) behaving badly

In a second report on PBMs, the Federal Trade Commission found that — shockingly — the companies have been marking up the prices of medications at their own pharmacies, costing patients and taxpayers millions … if not billions.

From 2017 to 2022, the companies — UnitedHealth Group’s Optum, CVS Health’s CVS Caremark and Cigna’s Express Scripts — marked up prices at their pharmacies by hundreds or thousands of percent, netting them $7.3 billion^* in revenue in excess of the acquisition costs of the drugs.

The FTC is already suing PBMs over steering diabetes patients to higher-priced drugs; this adds fuel to the fire.

^* “Probably an underestimate,” said an FTC spokesperson

Does pot beat benzos?

Where marijuana is legal, patients fill fewer prescriptions for benzodiazepines. They also fill slightly more prescriptions for antipsychotics and antidepressants, while neither barbiturates nor sleep meds are affected.

All this comes out of research from Georgia Tech policy wonks based on prescription data. And note: The numbers they looked at were for prescription fills, not prescriptions written, suggesting that the diagnoses were there but patients decided to self-medicate.

Does pot work as well as prescription meds? They don’t know: “Our research does not clarify whether the changes in dispensing patterns led to measurable changes in patient outcomes.”

Ebola, by any other name…

Did you know that the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses has renamed just about every virus you’re likely to encounter? We’re not just talking about calling monkeypox “mpox.” We’re talking wholesale renaming.

HIV-1 would henceforth be known as Lentivirus humimdef1. SARs-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid, would be known as Betacoronavirus pandemicum. Ebola was now Orthoebolavirus zairense.

This has actually been going on quietly over the past four years, and it wasn’t a big deal until December, when the US National Library of Medicine said it would update its gene and virus databases to use the new names. Cue the uproar, even though virologists have been living with a mess of unconnected names for years.

The good news is that everyone can still use the common name: “Researchers […] can keep using HIV in papers the same way researchers use “mouse” and not mus musculus.” And the better news is that they now have something to argue about on social media.

You must be this effective to join the weight-loss club

In a surprising move, the FDA is proposing that any new anti-obesity drugs show at least a 5% weight loss over a year in order to be considered for approval. The agency rarely sets a standard like that — the market usually takes care of it. Heck, that might even be the case here.

That’s a low bar com­pared with the 15% to 20% weight loss at one year that Eli Lil­ly and No­vo Nordisk have al­ready re­port­ed with their ap­proved weight loss drugs […] Any com­pet­ing prod­ucts would like­ly have to come close to or beat that bench­mark to have a com­mer­cial chance.

This is draft guidance, meaning it first has to go through the whole approval rigmarole, and even if approve it’s not binding — just a strong suggestion. If you know what we mean.

How far we’ve come

My little local paper runs a section called “Looking Back,” with news from 100 years ago:

Good thing times have changed — we’ve made such progress in the last 100 years. Imagine reading about people getting measles, chicken pox, mumps, diphtheria, or whooping cough today.

Oh, wait.

Your father smelt of better metabolism

If you’re like most people, you drink a lot of elderberry juice — with breakfast, as part of a cocktail, and at holiday celebrations. Good news: It can help with weight management and overall metabolic health.

Researchers at Washington State University found that drinking elderberry juice seems to improve metabolism and help the body burn fat, and that leads to both lower blood sugar and lower insulin levels. Oh, and it also improved subjects’ gut biomes.

“Elderberry,” said the lead researcher, “is an underappreciated berry.”