This spring the WHO kicked off World Health Day with a foreboding slogan, “Antimicrobial resistance: no action today, no cure tomorrow,” to increase awareness of the dangers of drug resistance. Two months later, a new strand of E coli:0104 rapidly spread throughout thirteen countries in Europe and proved resistant to more than a dozen antibiotics.
Drug resistance, a neglected but increasingly urgent problem, receives some much-needed attention this week as the focus of this year’s World Health Day, also dubbed Antimicrobial Resistance Day, on Thursday, April 7.
As some of you may know, CGD’s Drug Resistance Working Group released a report this summer, providing a comprehensive examination of drug resistance—across different diseases, geographies, and stakeholders. The report highlights alarmingly high rates of drug resistance throughout the world and warns of a growing public health crisis as more and more drugs lose their efficacy.
A new research study by Hoare et al in PLoS (ungated) projects that, within ten years after countries attain universal access to antiretroviral treatment for AIDS, one fifth of all patients starting treatment will never have a chance to benefit from the least-expensive and least-toxic treatments, because their initial infection will be a drug resistant strain of HIV.
This week on the Wonkcast, I'm joined by Rachel Nugent, Deputy Director for Global Health here at the Center for Global Development. She is the lead author on a new CGD working group report entitled The Race Against Drug Resistance, which prescribes a global effort to halt and reverse the spread of drug resistant microbes.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Henry Waxman (D-CA) and his staff are worried about something, and it’s not politics. The Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health is holding a series of hearings on antimicrobial resistance.
Drug resistance finally got its day on Capitol Hill last week when the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee held a hearing on the topic.
There’s a lot of attention being paid to the counterfeit drug trade at the moment. Former President of France, Jacques Chirac, recently chaired a meeting with West African leaders to discuss how to crack down on counterfeiting. Meanwhile, the Wellcome Trust and the American Pharmaceutical Group held an Opinion Formers' conference on counterfeit medicines (presentations here); the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations produced a brief on the issue; and Roger Bate has continued to draw attention to counterfeits and other drug quality issues in developing countries, including through his book Making a Killing. And this is all on top of the WHO-hosted IMPACT initiative on counterfeits, which started in 2006.
Resources for the Future is launching a new Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics, and Policy next week. The lunchtime launch is on Wednesday, October 7 and open to the public.
The Center’s name may be long and a bit wonky, but the purpose is simple: conduct analysis to improve prediction and prevention of disease outbreak and spread – here in the U.S. and globally. That sounds a lot like the CDC, doesn’t it?
Exactly one week ago, the FDA gave the nod to Novartis’ antimalarial drug Coartem, simultaneously granting it the first Priority Review Voucher (PRV) in FDA history. As reported in this blog several times before, the PRV program was enacted by an amendment to FDA law in September of 2007.