August 02, 2013
A roundup of news on drug resistance and other topics in global health.
To address the health risks that antibiotic overuse in animals could pose to human health, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has recommended restricting the use of colistin in farm animals to only infected animals or animals in contact with infections . [Nature News Blog]
According to a new study set to be published in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, antibiotic resistance in hospital-acquired infections in the US is at crisis levels. This study finds a much greater rise in antibiotic resistance among three common hospital-acquired infections than what was previously reported by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). [Medical Xpress]
New research in the journal PLoS One reports that ciclopirox, a fungicide that has been in clinical use for over twenty years, has shown strong activity against carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) in lab tests. [PLoS One]
In a study published in The Lancet, primary care practices in six different European countries were able to significantly reduce their rate of antibiotic prescribing for respiratory-tract infections through internet-based training. [The Lancet]
Amid growing insecticide-resistance in mosquitoes, an article in Environmental Health News writes on the efforts that pesticide companies and public health agencies are putting into developing effective and inexpensive insecticides and other novel approaches that researchers are working on to combat malaria-causing mosquitoes. [Environmental Health News]
In the US, broad-spectrum antibiotics were prescribed in more than 60 percent of antibiotic prescription cases during 2007-09; while in more than 25 percent of those cases, the antibiotics were useless as they were wrongly prescribed for viral infections, according to a study published in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. [University of Utah]
An article in The Guardian explores the impact of open source projects and open research, including the Malaria Box and the OSDD malaria program, on the development of drugs against malaria and other neglected diseases. [The Guardian]
After successful lab results, Kite Patch, a patent-pending technology that interferes with the mosquito s ability to detect C02 and makes humans invisible to mosquitoes, will be pilot-tested in malaria-endemic regions of Uganda with crowd-sourced funding. The initial research on which the Kite Patch is based was published in the journal Nature in 2011. [The Week]
The FDA has approved marketing of the first test for simultaneously detecting tuberculosis and the presence of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the US. This test, which is quicker and less complex to perform than previous FDA-approved tests to detect tuberculosis, had been endorsed by the WHO on December 8, 2010 and has already been used in a number of countries. [FDA]
The FDA also strengthened the warnings on a frequently used antimalarial drug in the US called mefloquine hydrochloride, which is also commonly known as Lariam, to include the drug s possible neurologic and psychiatric side effects, which could become permanent. [NY Times]
A new study published in the journal mBio describes how a mutation in Salmonella that makes it resistant to fluoroquinolones also confers resistance to this bacteria against other antibiotics or to the biocide tirclosan, an ingredient used in antibacterial soaps. [Science 2.0]
A new study published in the journal PLoS Medicine suggests that drug-resistant tuberculosis is a major public health threat in North Korea: 87% of 245 patients analyzed in this study were found to have multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. [The Atlantic]
In an interview with NPR, Tom Frieden, director of the CDC, talked about the threat of drug-resistant bacteria and expressed his optimism on successfully managing the problem of drug resistance. [NPR]
Eurosurveillance recently reported on the first European outbreak of carbapenem-resistant NDM-1 producing Acinetobacter baumannii, a common cause of ICU infections that has become resistant to multiple drugs, including carbapenems. [Wired Superbug]
A study in The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety illustrates how one US hospital used a hospital-wide, multidisciplinary approach comprising of five interventions to reduce the incidence of hospital-associated C. difficile infections by 70 percent and the level of mortality in patients with hospital-associated C. difficile infections by 64 percent. [News Medical]
Findings from a systematic simulation study conducted with a mathematical model of MRSA and published in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy suggest that reducing overall antibiotic consumption does not necessarily reduce antibiotic resistance; it is rather the class-specific changes in antibiotic use that should be considered . [ASM]
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