Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy

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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