September 23, 2012
A roundup of news on drug resistance and other topics in global health.
Last week s meetings on the Affordable Medicines Facility-malaria Review and the Financing of Febrile Illness Management have received some attention in the press: NPR s Health blog covered the AMFm review portion of the meeting, while the Center for Global Development blogged about the elephant in the room that is the US government s apparent lack of support for AMFm. Marketplace also produced a short segment on the meetings. [NPR, CGDev Blog, Marketplace]
On NPR’s Talk of the Nation, health care experts discuss the recent outbreaks of health care-associated infections, including the NIH superbug , and ways of dealing with such infections. [NPR]
Jay Keasling, a professor of biochemical engineering at UC Berkeley, gets awarded the Heinz Award for his research on developing a low-cost approach to produce artemisinin. [The Daily Californian]
Scientists have found a new type of mosquito in Kenya that has the potential to cause hundreds of thousands more deaths from malaria. [Independent Online]
A study published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases shows that after universal coverage of insecticidal nets, mosquitoes changed their biting behavior by switching their hours of peak aggression from 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. to around 5 a.m., the time when people would wake up and not be protected by mosquito nets. [MSNBC]
Cambodia launches a pilot project to combat malaria by training volunteers from remote villages to use online mapping systems and mobile phones to notify health authorities of new cases of malaria. [BBC]
In an interview with Forbes, Deborah Derrick, President of Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, discusses the current global efforts, challenges, and solutions to combat those diseases. [Forbes]
A study on A. baumannii published in the journal American Society for Microbiology reveals a new set of genes responsible for building the pathogen s drug resistance and suggests high-value drug targets against its infections. [Phys.org]
New research published in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine reveals that pyridomycin, a secretion of a soil bacterium, works as a natural antibiotic in treating drug-resistant tuberculosis. [Science Codex]
A study published in the journal PLoS ONE finds that both antibiotic-free and conventionally raised pigs had identical strains of the antibiotic-resistant C. coli. [Phys.org]
Reduction in hospital prescriptions of ciprofloxacin significantly reduced hospital infections from methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), while other infection control measures had little impact, according to research published in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. [Medical Xpress]
The 2nd European Conference on Antimicrobial Resistance & Infection Prevention will be held in Vilnius, Lithuania, on 4-5 October 2012.
A new federal project being drafted by the White House aims to gather information about medical mistakes and unsafe treatment practices. [NY Times]
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