April 2009

Dear Colleague,

I would like to draw your attention this month to two exciting new partnerships. The first is a multipronged US$33 million China-Gates Foundation initiative to tackle TB--an undertaking so forward-thinking and bold that, in a recent blog, I argue that it might just work!

The second initiative is aimed at actively getting antibiotic drug resistance in developing countries onto the global policy agenda. To learn more about the Global Antibiotic Resistance Partnership, please read this month's guest column by our colleagues from Resources for the Future.

Finally, World Malaria Day is just around the corner on April 25. We anticipate that an announcement of the $20+ million Gates Foundation grant made to Oxford University and WHO to create the WARN (Worldwide Antimalarial Drug Resistance Network) will emerge around that time. While buoying investments in surveillance, which we have identified as one of the highest priority needs to deal with resistance, we are hoping the benefits of the WARN surveillance and communication efforts will not be restricted to just malaria drug resistance.

As always, we welcome your thoughts at [email protected].

Regards,

Rachel Nugent
Deputy Director for Global Health
Center for Global Development

Resources for the Future Launches the Global Antibiotic Resistance Partnership

by Ramanan Laxminarayan and Hellen Gelband

Where AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria headline the health news, antibiotic resistance doesn’t make it above the fold. In fact, antibiotic resistance is a non-issue in most low- and middle-income countries. This audience hardly needs convincing, though, that antibiotic resistance is a serious problem already or will be within the decade. In a world where more infants and children are dying from pneumonia than from malaria, the challenge in saving lives is to make sure that children have access to antibiotic treatment, and to make sure that affordable antibiotics remain effective for the longer term.

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IN THE NEWS

Bacteria (Besides TB)

• Ethanol’s possible contribution to drug resistance (Twin Cities Daily Planet)
• Time to curb antibiotic use in agribusiness? (LA Times)
• Profits driving polypharmacy in Asia (Reuters)
• pread of drug-resistant bugs stimulated by chemicals in the water (The Guardian)
• Magic bullet in the treatment of MRSA? (Science Daily)
• Drug resistance concerns in Uganda (New Vision)
• Is the hypothesis (NY Times) that pigs are a source for human MRSA pure speculation? (Medical News Today)
• MRSA concerns in Hong Kong (Health and Community news.gov.hk)
• Flies as a vector of drug-resistant bacteria? (JHSPH Public Health News Center)
• Strengthening US state legislation to track MRSA in hospitals (The Olympian)
• MRSA concerns in Hawaii (Star Bulletin)

TB

• XDR-TB reaches 55 countries (Irin news)
• Transmission of MDR-TB among children in a South African hospital setting (Aidsmap)
• New diagnostic tool for drug-resistant TB (Cepheid press release)
• HIV infection as a risk factor for TB (New York Times)
• WHO: Urgent action against MDR and XDR-TB is critical (China View)
• 15 billion US dollars earmarked to fight MDR-TB (Top news.in)
• Drug-resistant TB on the rise in Asia (Google.com)
• Experience from Turkey in involving patients in treatment (Zimbabwe Telegraph)
• Drug resistant TB in the Philippines (PIA Information Service)

Malaria

• Hopes rise for a new antimalarial in the fight against resistance (BBC News)
• ACT subsidies are needed to deter artemisinin monotherapy (FT.com)
• Innovative scheme in Ghana to counter counterfeiting (Irin News)
• Fighting the spread of artemisinin resistance (Irin News)

HIV

• Abusing Efavirenz in South Africa leads to drug resistance (New York Daily News)
• Small-scale studies on HIV-DR in Mumbai (The Hindu)
• New HIV drug for fight against resistant strains (Forbes.com)

Other

• Resistant strains of H5N1 (CIDRAP)
• Resistant strains of flu in New Zealand (The Dominion Post)
• Mobile phone diagnosis approaches field trials (SciDev.Net)

Featured VIDEO

• Public Radio International airs a report on concerns about growing drug resistance on the Thai-Cambodian border.

latest research

• Tuberculosis Drug Resistance Mutation Database (PLoS Medicine, A. Sandgren et al.)
• Drug Resistance in Streptococcus pneumoniae Isolates Among Spanish Middle-aged and Older Adults with Community-acquired Pneumonia (BMC Infectious Diseases, A. Vila-Corcoles et al)
• Demonstration of Sustained Drug-Resistant HIV-1 Lineages Circulating amongst Treatment-Naïve Individuals (Journal of Virology, Hué et al)
• Engineered Bacteriophage Targeting Gene Networks as Adjuvants for Antibiotic Therapy (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, T. Lu and J. Collins)

PARTNER RESOURCES

• Download a powerful new book on drug-resistant TB
• Read ReACT’s most recent e-newsletter
• Peruse a new MDR/XDR-TB assessment and monitoring tool and conduct a comprehensive review of your country's or sub-region's capacity to prevent, diagnose, and treat MDR/XDR-TB
• EDCTP has just announced a TB diagnostics call for proposals worth Euro 8,000,000. Deadline is 24 July, 2009

RECENT/UPCOMING EVENTS

• Ministerial Meeting on MDR-XDR TB, Beijing, China, April 1-3, 2009: Highlights and Call for Action
• 36th Annual Conference on Global Health,Washington, DC, USA, May 26-30, 2009
• 19th European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, Helsinki, Finland, May 16-19, 2009
• 109th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, Philadelphia, USA, May 17-21, 2009

CALL FOR PAPERS

• Round 3 of the Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges Explorations is currently accepting grant proposals until May 28, 2009. New topics include 1) creating low-cost diagnostics for priority global health conditions and 2) creating new ways to induce mucosal immunity.