October 09, 2012
A roundup of news on drug resistance and other topics in global health.
Following last month s meeting on the review of the Affordable Medicines Facility-malaria (AMFm), CDDEP shares reflections and opinions from meeting participants on the blog. If you attended the meeting and would like to add your thoughts, please email us. [CDDEP]
Nature writes on the uncertain future of the AMFm, and potential scenarios for its continuation. The Humanosphere blog also weighs in on recent AMFm news coverage. [Nature, Humanosphere]
Hillary Clinton, the U.S. Secretary of Health, writes about the impact of the current administration s global health diplomacy in forging new alliances and saving more lives around the world. [HuffPo]
A switch to individual patient rooms in a hospital in Kent, UK, has not produced the expected decline in hospital-acquired infections. The director of infection prevention and control at the hospital believes more education is necessary to adapt to new challenges of single rooms. [Kent Online]
Research published in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy highlights the overuse of antibiotics as the main cause of the spread of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in hospitals. [Bioscholar]
Research presented at the 2012 Annual American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress in Chicago shows that giving intestinal alkaline phosphate (IAP), a naturally occurring enzyme, to mice on antibiotics resulted in a 10-fold decrease in C. difficile bacteria. [ABC News]
An article in the Time magazine discusses the role that the use of mefloquine, an anti-malaria drug that has been reported to cause impulsive violent behavior, could have played in the massacre of 16 Afghan villagers by Robert Bales, an Army Staff Sergeant. The article urges the military to stop using the drug in favor of alternate and safe anti-malarial drugs. [Time]
The Nobel Assembly awards the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to John B. Gurdon of the University of Cambridge and Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University for groundbreaking research in the manipulation of stem cells, including Gurdon s successful cloning of frogs in the 1960s. [NYTimes]
Due to overfeeding of antibiotics to dairy animals, levels of antibiotics in milk and milk products in Nepal have reached levels that are 75 times the EU legal standard. [MyRepublica]
UK s Health Protection Agency (HPA) and the World Health Organization (WHO) report that a new SARS-like virus has been detected in the UK. [NursingTimes]
Results from research published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene show that chloroquine, a previously effective drug to which parasites have since developed resistance, is again beginning to work against malaria. [ScienceBlog]
The President s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology recently published a report for the purpose of propelling innovation in drug discovery, development and evaluation. [Bloomberg BNA]
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