October 24, 2014
A roundup of news on drug resistance and other topics in global health.
CDDEP Director Ramanan Laxminarayan will be speaking at the TEDxGateway conference in Mumbai on November 2. Information about the event, location and other speakers is available online. [TEDxGateway]
New today on the CDDEP website: a visualization on key retail antibiotic consumption in the US and India that shows data representing higher prices and lower consumption rates for the newest antibiotics. [CDDEP]
Cases of Ebola were diagnosed for the first time in Mali and New York City this week, while Nigeria was declared Ebola-free by the World Health Organization on Monday. The official WHO count of cases in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia is nearing 10,000; Science Magazine published a discussion this week of underreporting and how organizations estimate how many actual cases are present. [Bloomberg, Science]
While researchers around the world ramp up studies this year on an Ebola vaccine, a vaccine made nearly 10 years ago that was 100 percent effective in monkeys has been sitting on shelves for years, highlighting the lack of research funding for diseases that primarly affect low- and middle-income countries. [The New York Times]
The White House announced a mandatory moratorium on enhanced pathogen research this week, halting funding on research that would enhance influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), amongst other pathogens. [Nature]
Four years after Haiti’s massive earthquake, the country is making significant progress in health outcomes and declining cholera cases, but there is still a long way to go, according to commentary published in The Lancet this week. [The Lancet]
Antibiotic use could be aiding the spread of salmonella in mice populations, found a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [US News]
According to a new study published in Diabetologia, type 1 diabetes is up to 50 percent more common in children who have previously had an Enterovirus infection. The strain of Enterovirus spreading in the US this year, D68, has now had 973 confirmed cases. [Infection Control Today, CDC]
Seeing graphs makes people believe drugs work: a study published last week in the journal Public Understanding of Science found that merely seeing a graph – with no new information not found in previously-read text – increased consumer confidence in a drug’s efficacy from 68 to 97 percent. [NPR]
Cows, chickens and pigs aren’t the only animals being given antibiotics; a new study in the Journal of Hazardous Materials found the presence of several classes of antibiotics in both farm-raised and wild fish. [TIME]
The New York Times published a profile of Rear Admiral R. Timothy Zeimer this week, who has worked for the last eight years as the coordinator of the US President’s Malaria Initiative, and has been called “one of the most quietly effective leaders in public health”. [The New York Times]
CDDEP is currently hiring Research Analysts for our New Delhi, India office. For more information and to apply, visit CDDEP’s job page.
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Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
