Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy

A roundup of news on drug resistance and other topics in global health.

On September 17-18, The Institute of Medicine and CDDEP will co-host a meeting to review the pilot phase of the Affordable Medicines Facility-malaria project and to discuss financing of broader febrile illness management. An issue brief summarizing the current state of AMFm and its future challenges and opportunities can be found here. Visit this page for more information about the meeting.

An article in Nature that covers recent steps taken in India to curb growing antibiotic resistance features CDDEP research. [Nature]

An article in The New York Times discusses the serious side effects associated with an important class of antibiotics known as fluroquinolones. [NY Times]

New guidelines commissioned by the Infectious Diseases Society of America state that doctors need to “accurately diagnose and treat strep throat in order to avoid inappropriate use of antibiotics that can lead to drug-resistant bacteria.” [US News]

Research, using newborn mice, published in the journal PLoS ONE models the effects of sepsis on newborns and finds “a robust inflammatory response to bacterial challenge even at the earliest hours of life.” [Eureka Alert]

Isolated bacteria found in caves have rich antimicrobial potential, with researchers finding that just one of their samples produced about a third of antibiotics ever described, including a novel antibiotic. [BBC]

A biochemistry professor at Case Western Reserve University has discovered new antivirulence drugs that make Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) and Streptococcus pyogenes harmless by blocking their production of toxins. [News Medical]

A paper co-authored by CDDEP director Ramanan Laxminarayan is named one of the “top 10 infection control papers of the year 2011-2012” at this year’s Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. [ICAAC]
Michael Kirsch, a physician, discusses the reasons why antibiotics are unnecessarily prescribed and concludes that physicians and patients are jointly responsible. [KevinMD Blog]

Citing a research that finds a significant number of seagull feces to harbor resistant E. coli, this article suggests that seagulls could contribute to the spread of drug resistant bacteria. [Petaluma360]

Wired reports that NDM-1, a gene which makes bugs resistant to almost all known antibiotics, has been found in a pet in the US. [Wired]

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Image via D. Garding/Flickr