March 2009

Dear Colleague,

This month I would like to highlight an exciting development in TB research: Collaborative Drug Discovery, a web-based platform for sharing preclinical research and upstream drug discovery data, announced in mid-February that its software is freely available for use by the TB community over a two-year period. View details here.

I would also like to draw your attention to some important work just getting underway. The WHO’s Third Patient Safety Challenge, described in our guest column this month, is focusing on antimicrobial resistance. We look forward to learning more about this initiative as it moves forward and hope to be able to bring you periodic updates.

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

Regards,

Rachel Nugent
Deputy Director for Global Health
Center for Global Development

The 3rd Global Patient Safety Challenge: Tackling Antimicrobial Resistance

By WHO’s World Alliance for Patient Safety

In 2008, the World Alliance for Patient Safety, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) patient safety programme, announced its 3rd Global Patient Safety Challenge: Tackling Antimicrobial Resistance. The work will build upon the previous work of WHO, particularly the Global Strategy for Containment of Antimicrobial Resistance published in 2001. The new project, under the leadership of David Heymann and Didier Pittet, will facilitate an international coalition to address the threat to patient safety posed by antimicrobial resistance.

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IN THE NEWS

Bacteria (Besides TB)

• Using viruses to tackle super-bacteria (Yahoo news)
• Ciprofloxacin-resistant strains of N. meningitidis detected in North America (Modern Medicine)
• Lessons from the climate change movement: the “resistance footprint” (The Canadian Press)
• Alarming increase in MRSA (Houma Today)
• Tobacco settlement funds used for resistance research in Pennsylvania (Prnewswire)
• Attempts to slow MRSA spread in jails (The Dallas Morning News)
• Resistant strains of bacteria and the ocean (ama-assn.org)
• Use of antibiotics in animals missing component in CDC strategy (Statesmanjournal.com)
• Free antibiotics in US pharmacies causes concern about resistance (The New York Times)

TB

• New tactics in the battle against TB (Scientific American)
• Potential of already-existing antibiotics to treat XDR-TB (Science Daily)
• Lesotho/South-Africa The connection between migration and resistance (PlusNews)
• More XDR-TB cases identified in Swaziland (Times of Swaziland)
• Suspicion of large number of MDR and XDR-TB cases in Zimbabwe (IPS news)
• TB drug resistance is higher in HIV positive individuals (TropIKA.net)
• MDR-TB project hampered in Inner Mongolia (MSF.org)
• Using DOTS-Plus in the battle against resistant strains of TB (Times of India)
• A primer on TB drug resistance development (Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science)

Malaria

• Higher temperatures leading to more resistant parasite strains? (Scientific American)
• WHO cracks down on new malaria resistance (SciDev.Net)
• Southern African cross-border initiative to eliminate malaria (New Era)
• Evidence of counterfeit anti-malarials leads to strong response in Uganda (Daily Monitor)
• Ensuring continued efficacy of artemisinin (The Phnom Penh Post)
• Introduction of combination therapy planned for Tanzania (Guardian/IPP media)
• Views on ACT resistance from Nigeria (The Punch)
• Efforts to eliminate ACT-tolerant strains of malaria to limit primary transmission (The World Today)

HIV

• Threat of an ART-resistant epidemic in Zimbabwe (Health-e)
• Viral load testing better method than CD4+ levels in detection of resistant HIV strains in Africa (Newswise Medical News)
• Genome Sequencer FLX may aid HIV treatment (Laboratory Talk)
• NorTech innovation award goes to ART drug resistance researchers (Eurekalert)
• Barriers to ART access upon release from prison can result in poor adherence and drive resistance (Newswise)

Other

Featured VIDEO

• The microbicide debate goes on. Listen to this March 12 discussion on U.S. National Public Radio or see this update on the status of microbicide research from the latest Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI).

latest research

• Changes in the Treatment Responses to Artesunate-Mefloquine on the Northwestern Border of Thailand during 13 Years of Continuous Deployment (PloS One, Carrara et al.)
• Drug Resistance Mutations for Surveillance of Transmitted HIV-1 Drug-Resistance: 2009 Update (PloS One, Bennett et al.)
• Quality of Anti-Malarial Drugs Provided by Public and Private Healthcare Providers in South-East Nigeria (Malaria Journal, Onwujekwe et al)
• Field-Based Evidence of Fast and Global Increase of Plasmodium falciparum (Malaria Journal, Ibrahim et al)
• Embracing Ecology to Limit Antimicrobial Resistance (Canadian Medical Association Journal, Nicolle et al)
• Antibiotic Use and Population Ecology: How You Can Reduce Your “Resistance Footprint” (Canadian Medical Association Journal, Patrick et al)
• Antimicrobial Resistance in Hospitals: How Concerned Should We Be? (Canadian Medical Association Journal, Mulvey et al)
• Emergence of Multiclass DrugResistance in HIV‐2 in Antiretroviral‐Treated Individuals in Senegal: Implications for HIV‐2 Treatment in Resource‐Limited West Africa (Clinical Infectious Diseases, Gottlieb et al.)
• Treatment Outcomes Among Patients with Multidrug-Resistant Tuberculosis: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (The Lancet, Orenstein et al., Free but login required for full text)

PARTNER RESOURCES

• Global Health Delivery-Connect with global health implementers via online, virtual communities: one of which focuses on drug-resistant TB
• Journal of Medicine Use in Developing Countries-Contribute to this new open-access, not-for-profit resource with a quick review schedule (3-months from date of submission)
• “Plan to Combat Extensively Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis”, published in mid-February by the US Center for Disease Control’s Federal Tuberculosis Task Force
• ReAct Latin America and PAHO to initiate research, education and communication projects around bacterial resistance and promote rational use of antibiotics
• Round 3 of the Gates Grand Challenges in Global Health opens on March 31, 2009. Round 2 had a specific call for innovative research and technologies for drug resistance and we expect this new round to as well.

RECENT/UPCOMING EVENTS

• 16th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), Montreal, Canada, February 8-11, 2009
• On February 23, 2009, the Institute of Medicine’s Forum on Drug Discovery, Development, and Translation hosted a meeting for U.S. Congressional staff and global policy makers to discuss the new white paper “Stemming the tide of MDR-TB: Major barriers to addressing the growing epidemic.”
• 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