Senior STDs jumped

Yet more info shows that STDs are rising fast among seniors — we’re talking a 24% jump during the pandemic, which makes us wonder if grandma misunderstood what “lockdown” meant.

One of the issues is that symptoms of some STDs can look a lot like other age-related conditions, which means they can easily be misdiagnosed; no one expects Aunt Shirley to have gonorrhea.

Speaking of which, the number of men with gonorrhea jumped higher than the number of women with it, but the reverse was true for syphilis. Go figure.

The next bird flu

Germany is reporting the first case of the H7N5 bird flu. Not just the first case in Germany — the first case ever. (Well, since 2005 when this stuff started being tracked.)

“The outbreak killed 6,000 out of a flock of 90,879 birds in the town of Bad Bentheim in Lower Saxony.”

But no worries — it hasn’t jumped to other animals. What could go wrong?

Once more with … failure

What was that saying about ‘Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results?”

Yet another pharma company — this time Boehringer Ingelheim — challenged Medicare’s authority to negotiate drug prices. And yet another pharma company lost that challenge.

BI argued (just like the others) that it was essentially forced to participate in Medicare/-caid because it wouldn’t make as much money if it didn’t participate. Thus it should be allowed to charge taxpayers whatever it wants for its drugs, and being forced to negotiate violated its First Amendment rights.

Once again (the 5th time), a federal judge disagreed. “[C]ompanies remain free to withdraw from Medicare or Medicaid and can decide not to participate in the drug price negotiations.”

Metal in tampons?

Some tampons — even big name-brand ones — have some nasty stuff in them, including lead and arsenic. That’s what UC Berkeley researchers found after testing 30 tampons from 14 brands in the US, the UK, and Greece.

The analysis looked for concentrations of arsenic, barium, calcium, cadmium, cobalt, chromium, copper, iron, manganese, mercury, nickel, lead, selenium, strontium, vanadium and zinc. All 16 metals were detected in one product.

What they don’t know is whether those metals leech out of the tampons or if they’re absorbed by the body (“Further studies are necessary”). As to where the metals come from, they might have originated in the soil the cotton grew in.

Fun facts about pharma-sponsored dinners

Canadian researchers used CMS’s Open Payments database to see just how the pharmaceutical industry was targeting prescribers. Some highlights:

• In total, pharma companies sponsored more than a million in-person events in just 2022.
• In that year, just 10 products accounted for more than 16,000 dinner events.
• Nurse practitioners are becoming the target of these meals more often.

It’s a smart investment in dry chicken and iced tea:

Receipt of industry payments, including low-value payments for food and beverage, is often associated with physicians prescribing higher quantities of promoted and higher cost drugs, such as brand name drugs over generics.

Flu, pregnancy, and aspirin

Inflammation caused by the flu can add complications to pregnancy, notably reducing blood flow to the placenta. But there might be a simple solution: low-dose aspirin.

It’s already used against inflammation from preeclampsia, so Aussie researchers wondered if it would also help with other causes. So they tested the idea on mice, and yep “mice treated daily with low-dose aspirin had less inflammation and improved fetal development and offspring survival.”