November 2008

Dear Colleague,

October was a busy month for both the DRWG and the global TB community. Expert discussions on MDR and XDR-TB were held during the 39th World Union Conference on Lung Health (search the entire program here). Members of the DRWG were there to share and get feedback on our preliminary recommendations. Among other topics, we made good headway in discussing laboratory capacity-strengthening where we expect our proposals to dovetail well with a major new World Bank lab building effort. An impressive website was launched last month to raise public awareness about TB. It showcases powerful photographs taken by James Nachtwey (support came from a TED prize) to humanize the disease and encourage website visitors to learn more about it and what can be done.

Last week members of the DRWG presented the issues of global drug resistance at the Global Ministerial Forum for Research on Health in Bamako, Mali. They also hosted two consultation sessions on 20 November to gather feedback about our potential areas of recommendation. To learn more, see the guest column "Letter from Bamako" below.

As always, we welcome your thoughts at drug_resistance@cgdev.org.

Regards,

Rachel Nugent
Deputy Director for Global Health
Center for Global Development

FEATURED COLUMN - LETTER FROM BAMAKO

By Susan Foster, Martha Gyansa-Lutterodt, Rachel Nugent and Alix Beith

We are here to take part in the Global Ministerial Forum on Research for Health, a quadrillenial event to raise support for health research in and for developing countries. The attendees are largely biomedical and anthropological researchers, donors, international organizations (with overwhelming representation from several of the sponsor organizations) and journal editors (a sometimes soporific mix!). READ MORE

CGD DRUG RESISTANCE WORKING GROUP UPDATES

• The DRWG held its first two "pre-consultation" sessions on 17 October in Paris with four Working Group members and a high-level audience of TB experts. View the DRWG presentation here.
• DRWG members Joanne Carter and Rachel Nugent spoke about the problems of MDR- and XDR-TB as part of the SAIS Global Health and Foreign Policy Initiative Fall 2008 Seminar Series.

IN THE NEWS

Antibiotics

• Hospital disinfectants and antiseptics losing their strength (Telegraph)
• Clues to combat resistance: research pinpoints where myxopyronin attacks bacteria (University of Alabama at Birmingham)
• A call for Indian medical practitioners and government to be more active in combating resistance (Organizer)

TB

• Tracking XDR-TB survival rates: Grim findings (Reuters)
• The challenge of XDR-TB (Newsweek)
• Rise in MDR-TB in the Ukraine (The Japan Times)
• MDR-TB and isolation in Kenya (Irin News)

Malaria

• First pediatric ACT expected on the market in January 2009 (Kenyan Broadcasting Company)
• Hints of artemisinin losing its strength? (Sciencenews)
• Collaboration between Sanofi-Aventis and MMV to speed up R&D of new malaria treatments (Pharmaceutical Business Review)
• Medical establishment urging implementation of anti-counterfeit bill in Kenya (Daily nation)

HIV

• Concerns about HIV DR in Tanzania (Daily News Online) are further compounded by evidence of poor adherence (Daily News Online)
• Resistant strains of HIV raising worries of increased child deaths (Voice of America)
• New drug targets resistant HIV strains (The Cornell Daily Sun)
• Drug-resistant strains of HIV in China (Reuters)

Featured VIDEO

• How best to optimize antibiotic use and how to minimize emergence of drug resistance? Click here to view the first part of a three-part exchange by Dr. Stuart Levy and Linda Tollefson from their September 18 presentation at the Koshland Science Museum in Washington, D.C.

latest research

• Spread of anti-malarial drug resistance: Mathematical model with implications(Malaria Journal, 2008, 7:229. Pongtavornpinyo et al.)
• 104 new Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Explorations grants were made. (Click here to see the 20 grants awarded under the "Create Drugs and Delivery Systems to Limit Drug Resistance" topic area.)