Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy

A roundup of news on drug resistance and other topics in global health.

Yahoo News extensively quotes CDDEP director, Ramanan Laxminarayan, in an article discussing the challenges and progress in tackling antibiotic resistance. [Yahoo News]

An editorial in Nature notes the successes of the Affordable Medicines Facility-malaria (AMFm) and shares concerns about the impact of the Global Fund's decision to effectively end the program. [Nature]

AMFm “has very little chance of survival at this point,” says CDDEP director Ramanan Laxminarayan in an Economist article on the Global Fund’s recent restructuring and its decision to roll AMFm into its general grant process. [The Economist]

USA Today reports on the rising threat of Carbapenem-Resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) in the US. [USA Today]

According to new data from the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), Klebsiella pneumoniae and Escherichia coli are continuously gaining resistance to antibiotics in Europe. [CIDRAP]

England’s chief medical officer warns that antibiotics are rapidly losing their effectiveness and issues a list of “dos and don’ts” for a judicious use of antibiotics. [BBC]

Results from a survey looking at the prevalence of hospital-acquired infections and antibiotic prescribing in Ireland show that 5% of patients admitted to hospitals in the country acquire an infection. [RTE]

Consumer Reports’ investigation of pork sold in the US finds a widespread prevalence of the pathogen yersinia enterocolitica and other harmful bacteria, including antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and traces of the drug ractopamine. [HuffPo]

The annual report on healthcare-associated infections in Alabama hospitals during 2011 are available online.

Mark Kendall, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Queensland in Australia, is developing Nanopatches to replace the traditional syringe-and-needle method that will make vaccination painless, cheaper, safer and more effective. [National Geographic]

Results from research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) show that a potential new malaria drug is capable of killing malaria parasites rapidly in culture and significantly reducing malarial infections in mice. [Phys.org]

Galapagos, a biotechnology company, announces the discovery of a new class of antibiotics and reports that its candidate antibiotic, CAM-1, has killed 100% of all drug resistant Staphylococcus aureus, including MRSA. [Reuters]

In an interview with The Guardian, Dr. Prudence Hamade, Senior Technical Officer at Malaria Consortium, explains the dangers of the growing resistance of malaria parasites to artemisinins in Southeast Asia. [The Guardian]

According to new research published in the journal PLoS Medicine, GeneXpert, a genetic tuberculosis and drug resistance screening tool, is better and more cost-effective at reducing the disease’s spread than current methods recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO). [Stanford News]

A newly established Malaria Host-Pathogen Interaction Center (MaHPIC) will use systems biology to study and catalog the interaction of malaria parasites with their human and animal hosts in molecular detail. [Emory News]

An article in the BBC discusses concerns over the ways outsourced clinical trials are carried out in developing countries. [BBC]

Research published in the journal Molecular Systems Biology shows that under specific conditions, some bacteria die “altruistically” to increase the drug resistance of other bacteria in the population. [Nature]

An article in PLoS Blogs discusses how we might be contributing to increasing antibiotic resistance through our efforts to prevent it. [PLoS Blogs]

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