Thomas Frieden
See the following -
A New Drug In The Age Of Antibiotic Resistance
Two alarming figures from a report released last month by the U.K. government: By 2050, antibiotic resistance will cost the world a projected 10 million lives and $8 trillion each year...
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CDC Threat Report: Yes, Agricultural Antibiotics Play A Role In Drug Resistance
The grave assessment on the advance of drug resistance, released Monday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, contained some important observations about the relationship between antibiotic use in agriculture and resistant infections in humans. [...] Read More »
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Citing Anthrax And Smallpox Scares, White House Tells Federal Labs To Take Stock
After recent mishandling of potentially deadly pathogens, the White House is urging all federal laboratories to conduct what it is calling a “safety stand-down,” security and science officials announced Thursday. Agencies that handle infectious agents or toxins have been asked to complete overviews of their programs within 30 days of a memo dated Aug. 18...
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Ebola in the United States: Short on Accountable 'Open' Information, Effective Systems Planning and Decision Making
Events in the present Ebola crisis prompt unease that the United States deployment of Web based, standardized population health and biosurveillance information services is fragmented, incomplete and insufficient, prompting me to write this blog. The United States has made significant progress in public health and medical preparedness since the 9/11 terrorist attacks; yet, poorly interconnected information systems add to our vulnerability to planning and response to viruses like Ebola or enviro virus EV-D68 that threaten the health of large populations. Today, a gap exists between information technology specialists and public health programmatic or scientific personnel.
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Factory Farms Sow Superbugs
Imagine a world where a scraped knee on a playground could have deadly complications. A world where chemotherapy and radiation are less effective cancer treatments because of increasingly common post-treatment infections, or where lifesaving drugs we regularly rely on today no longer heal people...
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FDA Antimicrobial Resistance Guidelines Fail to Address Root Causes
Last December, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published two controversial documents on its website: Guidance 213 and the Veterinary Feed Directive (VFD). The guidelines stirred a firestorm of protests from public health offiicials who argue that the guidelines are too weak to prevent the continuing growth of antibiotic resistant germs...the crisis, as outlined by Dr. Joseph Mercola, is that we are now "facing the perfect storm to take us back to the pre-antibiotic age, when some of the most important advances in modern medicine – intensive care, organ transplants, care for premature babies, surgeries and even treatment for many common bacterial infections – will no longer be possible." Read More »
Hospital Antibiotic Use Can Put Patients At Risk, Study Says
Doctors in some hospitals prescribe up to three times as many antibiotics as doctors at other hospitals, putting patients at greater risk for deadly superbug infections, according to a federal study released Tuesday. Read More »
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Lawmakers Reaffirm Demand For Biowatch Data
The Homeland Security Department has turned over "substantial" documentation in response to a congressional panel's request for records on a controversial biological agent sensor network, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not been similarly forthcoming in providing related information, two Republican lawmakers said... Read More »
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RNRN Launches Fundraising Drive For Healthcare Workers In Ebola-Stricken Nations
The Registered Nurse Response Network (RNRN), a project of National Nurses United (NNU), the nation’s largest professional organization of RNs, has initiated a national fundraising campaign to provide desperately needed personal protective equipment for frontline healthcare workers caring for patients stricken by the Ebola virus...
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UMD Researchers Develop Tool to Counter Public Health IT Challenges
Front-line protection of U.S. communities against disease epidemics relies on seamless information sharing between public health officials and doctors, plus the wherewithal to act on that data. But health departments have faltered in this mission by lacking guidance to effectively strategize about appropriate “IT investments. And incidents like the current Zika crisis bring the issue to the forefront,” says Ritu Agarwal, Robert H. Smith Dean's Chair of Information Systems and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Research at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business...
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Viral Intelligence
The CDC thinks that American hospitals are prepared to handle Ebola. RNs beg to differ...
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What Would Keep Ebola From Spreading In The US? Investing In Simple Research Years Ago.
There’s a thing you learn, when you’ve been writing about infectious diseases for a while: People love drama. They’re not so much with detail...
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Worse Than Ebola: U.S. Not Preparing for the Next Bio-Threat
The U.S. government is slacking off on preparing for the next big pandemic or biological terrorism attack and is not only endangering its citizens but also missing out on a great opportunity to score political points, experts said Monday. Protecting the United States from the next pandemic of killer flu, or from a bioterrorist strike, is something Republicans and Democrats can easily agree on, a top congressional appropriator told a biodefense panel...
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‘Superbug’ Scourge Spreads as U.S. Fails to Track Rising Human Toll
Fifteen years after the U.S. declared drug-resistant infections to be a grave threat, the crisis is only worsening, a Reuters investigation finds, as government agencies remain unwilling or unable to impose reporting requirements on a healthcare industry that often hides the problem...
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