October 31, 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 this weekend, held in Mumbai on November 2. The event will be broadcast live online. [TEDxGateway]
DRIVE-AB, a €9.4 million public-private consortium on antibiotic resistance, was launched this month. The project, which CDDEP researchers will be working on, focuses on a developing a standard of responsible antibiotic use and creating new economic models for the antibiotic development industry. [EurekAlert]
Slate interviewed CDDEP Director Ramanan Laxminarayan for a story published this week on Public Health England’s Antibiotic Guardians campaign. “It’s not innocuous to get an antibiotic that you don’t really need, and I think people don’t really realize that,” said Laxminarayan. [Slate]
The official count of Ebola cases rose significantly this week to 13,706; the World Health Organization (WHO) stated that this is primarily due to new reporting of older cases and not a rise in the pace of the virus’s spread. New Ebola research progress has been made as scientists found links between certain genes and Ebola response in mice, while potential vaccines remain in trials expected to continue for the next few months. [The Economist, The Washington Post]
Twitter could help forecast this year’s flu season: a study published this week in PLOS Currents found that research using tweets about the flu reduced influenza forecasting prediction error 17 to 30 percent from baseline studies. [PLOS]
A new drug, delamanid, is now available for treatment of adults with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. A report from the World Health Organization published last week found that tuberculosis cases worldwide have increased in recent years, though tuberculosis deaths have decreased. [WHO, BBC News]
Enterovirus-D68 infections – currently over 1,000 cases in the United States – are expected to decline as the weather gets colder; the virus spreads most in the summer and early fall. [Infection Control Today]
According to new research published in The Lancet, simply adding latrines to areas with poor sanitation may not significantly change health outcomes; additional efforts like cleaner water and effective handwashing campaigns may be necessary to ensure proper latrine use. [The Lancet]
Malaria’s next enemy might be a fixed-wing drone. Researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine have begun using small drones to map the spread of malaria in Borneo and track the parasite’s progression from macaque monkeys to mosquitoes and then human hosts. [LiveScience]
CDDEP is currently hiring Research Analysts for our New Delhi, India office. For more information and to apply, visit CDDEP’s jobs page.
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