"The Daily Dose"

At least once a day, Lisa Pisano feels the itch. The 30-year-old fashion publicist goes to the reception desk of her New York City office to accept a delivery of clothing samples from a designer. The courier hands over the garments, swings his messenger bag forward on his hip, fishes inside for a clipboard and hands her a pen. And then she feels it: a tickle at the back of her mind. A little rush of disquiet. Oh, my God, she thinks. Where has that pen been?

She imagines the possibilities: tucked behind the courier’s ear. Clutched by a stranger’s hand, which that day had probably touched a bathroom door or a subway handrail. She thinks about the millions of people in New York, eating, scratching, rubbing their noses, picking up bacteria and then leaving it on that handrail, and then on the person’s hands, and then on the courier’s pen, and then on her hand, her face, her lungs, her… Ick.

Pisano has always been germ-conscious — she wipes off her purse if it’s been resting on the floor and swabs her keyboard, phone and mouse with disinfecting wipes — but the pen problem pushes her over the edge every time.

One day, on the way to work, she spotted her salvation in an office-supply store window: a pen made of antibacterial plastic. She bought a handful and now, whenever the messengers buzz for her, she carries one to the door. Her co-workers tease her. She ignores them. “I’m known in the office for being a little nutty about my pens,” she says, laughing but not apologizing. “If you take my pen, I’m coming after you.”

Admit it: You’ve got something in your own life that makes you go ick. Ask any group of women what they do to protect themselves from germs, and the stories will pour out: We open the bathroom door with elbows, punch the elevator buttons with knuckles, carry wet wipes to disinfect the ATM — and we wonder whether we’re going a little too far. Even the doctors we turn to for reassurance aren’t immune. “I’m extremely aware of the potential for being ‘contaminated,’ in and out of my office,” says Susan Biali, M.D., a 37-year-old physician in Vancouver, British Columbia. “I wouldn’t touch the magazines in the waiting room if you paid me!”

When Self.com polled readers about their germophobia, more than three quarters said they flush public toilets with their foot, and 63 percent avoid handrails on subways, buses and escalators — all unnecessary precautions, experts say. Almost 1 in 10 say they avoid shaking hands, behavior that may flirt with full-fledged obsession, when your efforts to sanitize your life begin to stymie your day-to-day functioning.

Germophobia, of course, is not listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But mental-health professionals agree that, in vulnerable people, extreme germ awareness can be both a symptom of and a catalyst for a variety of anxiety ailments for which women are already more prone — including obsessive-compulsive disorder, which often features repetitive hand washing and fear of contamination. Ironically, hands that are dry and cracked from overwashing are more likely to pick up an infection through openings in the skin, says Joshua Fox, M.D., a spokesman in New York City for the American Academy of Dermatology.

Read the entire article at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29166897/

WASHINGTON - Take the generic drug clonidine for high blood pressure? Double-check that you didn’t leave the drugstore with Klonopin for seizures, or the gout medicine colchicine.

Mixing up drug names because they look or sound alike — like this trio — is among the most common types of medical mistakes, and it can be deadly. Now new efforts are aiming to stem the confusion, and make patients more aware of the risk.

Nearly 1,500 commonly used drugs have names so similar to at least one other medication that they’ve already caused mix-ups, says a major study by the U.S. Pharmacopeia, which helps set drug standards and promote patient safety.

Last week the influential group opened a Web-based tool to let consumers and doctors easily check if they’re using or prescribing any of these error-prone drugs, and what they might confuse it with. Try to spell or pronounce a few on the site — http://www.usp.org/ — and it’s easy to see how mistakes can happen. Did you mean the painkiller Celebrex or the antidepressant Celexa?

Due out later this fall is a more patient-oriented Web site, a partnership of the nonprofit Institute for Safe Medication Practices and online health service iGuard.org, that will send users e-mail alerts about drug-name confusion.

And the Food and Drug Administration — which currently rejects more than a third of proposed names for new drugs because they’re too similar to old ones — is preparing a pilot program that would shift more responsibility to manufacturers to guard against name confusion. The goal is to spell out how to better test for potential mix-ups before companies seek approval to sell their products.

“There are so many new drugs approved each year, this problem can only get worse,” warns USP vice president Diane Cousins.

At least 1.5 million Americans are estimated to be harmed each year from a variety of medication errors, and name mix-ups are blamed for a quarter of them.

Rarely does a company change a drug’s name after it hits the market, although it’s happened twice since 2005. The Alzheimer’s drug Reminyl now is named Razadyne, after mix-ups, including two reported deaths, with the old diabetes drug Amaryl. The cholesterol pill Omacor is now named Lovaza, after mix-ups with blood-clotting Amicar.

Doctor’s penmanship only part of problem
Doctors’ notoriously bad handwriting isn’t the only culprit. A hurried pharmacist faced with alphabetized bottles on a shelf might grab the wrong one.

Nor are computerized prescriptions a panacea. A doctor who e-prescribes still can click the wrong row on the alphabetized screen, picking the bone drug Actonel instead of the diabetes drug Actos.

Phone or fax a prescription, and static or smudged ink can turn the epilepsy drug Lamictal into the antifungal pill Lamisil.

Read the entire article at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26497545/