Weekly Digest: Diagnostic traces individual’s entire viral history, CDDEP joins White House Forum on Antibiotic Stewardship

CDDEP joined more than 150 major food companies, retailers and human and animal health stakeholders this week at a day-long White House Forum on Antibiotic Stewardship.  Director Ramanan Laxminarayan participated in the forum, committing CDDEP to continued policy research and enhanced information for public consumption. All participants were encouraged to make public commitments to curb antibiotic resistance and many did so. CDDEP also launched an interactive antibiotic timeline to coincide with the event, which details key antibiotic approvals since 1953, with charts of annual U.S. sales of each drug from 2000 through 2010. A video of the forum’s opening session is available online, along with a White House fact sheet about the event. [National Geographic, CDDEP, The White House]

Foster Farms announced this week that it will aim to eliminate antibiotics used to treat human illnesses from its chicken production. As of last month, the large-scale chicken producer has removed antibiotics that the company deems “critical to human medicine,” and plans to use other human-use antibiotics only when medically necessary to keep a flock healthy. Jonathan Kaplan, director of the National Resources Defense Council’s food and agriculture program, said the shift “is not quite as robust as what Perdue has already accomplished or what Tyson has pledged to do, [but is] on track and heading in the right direction.” Foster Farms is the tenth-largest chicken producer in the United States. [The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times]

A new diagnostic test can reveal the entire history of a patient’s viral infections with a single drop of blood. The test, described this week in Science, can detect over 1,000 virus strains and could be used to track disease patterns across populations, uncover links between viruses and certain types of cancer and myriad other purposes, including applications in clinical medicine. According to the test’s developers, it may eventually cost as little as $25 to run. The patent application has only recently been submitted and the diagnostic is not yet available commercially.  [The New York Times, Science]

An outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in South Korea has killed four people and left the country alarmed at potential spread of the illness. The outbreak started with one man returning to Korea from the Middle East with MERS and has now spread to 41 people in Korea and one in China as of June 5. Health authorities are completing contact tracing and quarantine of potentially affected individuals and local officials have closed more than 900 schools. A World Health Organization risk assessment notes that with proper infection control measures in healthcare facilities—where the disease is most likely to spread—the outbreak should be relatively straightforward to contain. [WHO, The Economist]

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is fulfilling his campaign promise to bring more toilets to the country—but many people aren’t using them. Modi’s government installed 5.8 million toilets in the last year to improve sanitation and limit waterborne diseases in India, where diarrheal disease is the leading killer of children under five. But in many areas where toilets have never been used, citizens are unwilling to use them. Chaudhary Birender Singh, India’s minister for rural development, acknowledged that it takes much more than building toilets to improve sanitation: “We have to diligently monitor the use over a period of time and reward them with cash incentives to the village councils at every stage. Only then will it become a daily habit.” [The Washington Post]

Researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo have engineered E. coli to produce antibiotics for fighting drug-resistant bacteria.  The new production method uses E. coli as a pathway to produce the materials necessary to create erythromycin, and harnesses the bacterium’s rapid growth rate and relatively smooth uptake of new genes to develop different types of the drug. The research team has created more than 40 new analogs of the drug so far, three of which successfully killed erythromycin-resistant bacteria in lab tests. [Science Advances, SUNY Buffalo]

Would speeding up drug approvals with the 21st Century Cures Act actually take us back to a time when drugs were less safe? A perspective article published in the New England Journal of Medicine argues that if passed, the bill—which aims to spur development by speeding up approval of new drugs and devices—would decrease product safety and efficacy to the point of concern. According to authors Jerry Avorn and Aaron S. Kesselheim, though the bill is well-intended and could have some positive effect, it goes too far in redefining the evidence needed for drug approval. They write: “Patients and physicians would not benefit from legislation that instead of catapulting us into the future, could actually bring back some of the problems we thought we had left behind in the 20th century.” [New England Journal of Medicine]

Polio cases in Pakistan are down 70 percent this year. The country has seen a mere 25 cases of polio in 2015; government officials cited progress against militants in northern tribal territories as the reason for the decline. Attacks on health workers in that region and a militant-imposed vaccination ban in North Waziristan led to a 15-year high in polio cases last October. [BBC]