Pharmacy News and Stories

Students are empowered to carry and administer Narcan regardless of whether a school district has a policy in place and without permission from schools. The new law also resolves some legal gray areas.
 
“The question was, are the schools immune?” said José Esquibel, director of the Colorado Consortium for Prescription Drug Abuse Prevention. “Schools wanted to know, ‘Are we going to be liable for something that occurs on school campuses, and could a parent or someone else initiate a lawsuit against the school?’”

Dr. Sunny Linnebur, who practices at a primary care clinic serving patients over 75, is focused on drug safety and deprescribing. “What I want students to understand is when you give a medication to a 40-year-old it has one outcome, but for an 80-year-old it can have a completely different outcome,” she said. “There are adverse reactions that can lead to hospitalization. We have to be careful and thoughtful about medications in older adults.”

“I worry when people are in an enclosed space because new data is beginning to show that secondhand marijuana smoke may be just as dangerous as the primary smoke,” Robert Page, PharmD, said. “Like tobacco, cannabis affects the central nervous system, and there are side effects which tend to primarily be cardiovascular in nature.”

Meghan N. Jeffres, PharmD, says that her new study demonstrates that cefazolin should be considered first-line regardless of penicillin allergy. “Prosthetic joint infections, in particular, are very bad, with a five-year mortality rate of 30 percent, and preventing them should be high on our list. Our study shows that cefazolin is significantly better than clindamycin and/or vancomycin in achieving that goal, without added HSR risk,” she said.