Midnight at the crossroads of happy and healthy

If you know someone who’s graduating from high school but isn’t planning to go on to college, you can suggest they go to work at Walgreens. The company is #3 on the American Opportunity Index list of Best Places for High School Graduates to Start a Career. (If you’re curious, Chipotle and Lowe’s are #1 and #2, respectively.)

The list is based on companies’ willingness to hire people without degrees as well as their opportunities for promotion.

Congrats, Mandy!

PCOM has named Dr. Sara (Mandy) Reece the interim dean of the School of Pharmacy at PCOM Georgia. She’s been a fixture at PCOM, serving as the college’s vice chair of the Department of Pharmacy Practice and director of interprofessional education. Chops-wise, she’s got them: In 2019 she was named PCOM School of Pharmacy Teacher of the Year for Pharmacy Practice, and in 2022 and 2023 was named Faculty Preceptor of the Year.

A big high-five from all of us!

Two-question test for smokers

How can you tell if someone will be able to quit smoking? Turns out all it takes is two simple questions to get a score of how addicted they are, and thus how difficult quitting will be:

  1. On the days that you smoke, how soon after you wake up do you have your first cigarette? (four options from ‘5 minutes’ to ‘more than an hour’)
  1. How many cigarettes do you typically smoke per day? (four options from ‘10 or fewer’ to ‘more than 30’)

Read the details.

Nasal sprays vs respiratory viruses

The idea of nasal-spray vaccines has been gaining ground since the pandemic, and the latest place with a twist on the concept is the University of Houston.

Two twists, actually: One (NanoSTING) is “complementary to vaccines.” It helps prevent infection by keeping the immune system in the nasal compartment primed to fight whatever comes in through the nose.

Because it kills whatever comes in through the nose, NanoSTING also helps prevent transmission.

The other (NanoSTING-SN) is an actual vaccine delivered through the nose that, the UH folks say, might be a universal coronavirus vaccine; it “eliminates virus replication in both the lungs and the nostrils” … well, in the lab at least.

Both are still in the preclinical stage, so we’ll just file them under “check back in a few years.”

It’s allergy time!

Actually, it’s allergy med time, according to the American College of Allergy Asthma and Immunology. Meaning it’s time to at least start thinking about putting those allergy meds out on the end caps so patients can start taking them a couple of weeks before the allergens (think ragweed) begin to appear.

We can do better

The latest analysis from WalletHub, “Best & Worst States for Health Care (2024)*,” has bad news for the Peach State. Georgia ranks #48 out of 51 states and DC; only West Virginia, Alabama, and Mississippi are worse.

The rankings are based on a lonnng list of weighted criteria in categories of cost, access, and outcomes, e.g., insurance premiums and coverage, hospital beds, number of healthcare pros, rates of certain diseases, and more.

If you’re curious, Minnesota ranked #1, followed by Rhode Island and South Dakota.

* aka “States with Best Health Care Systems”

Elsewhere: Razorback edition

Arkansas officials have ordered four PBMs — CVS Caremark, Express Scripts, Magellan, and MedImpact — to pay a total of $1.47 million in fines for paying Arkansas pharmacies less than what they’re required to, which is “at least as much as the national average of what drugstores pay wholesalers for the drugs.”

How much money the PBMs saved by underpaying wasn’t clear, but they were fined $5,000 for each violation the state knows about. And no, the money isn’t going back to the pharmacies.