Tom Frieden
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Drug-resistant ‘Nightmare Bacteria’ Show Worrisome Ability to Diversify and Spread
A family of highly drug-resistant and potentially deadly bacteria may be spreading more widely—and more stealthily—than previously thought, according to a new study from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Researchers examined carbapenem resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) causing disease in four U.S. hospitals. They found a wide variety of CRE species. They also found a wide variety of genetic traits enabling CRE to resist antibiotics, and found that these traits are transferring easily among various CRE species..
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Ebola Now Threatens National Security In West Africa
The Ebola virus outbreak entrenched in west Africa has become a real risk to the stability and security of society in the region, the top US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official said today after returning yesterday from a visit there...
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Feeding A Disease With Fake Drugs
Thanks to billions of dollars spent on diagnosis and treatment [for tuberculosis] over the past decade, deaths and infections are slowly declining. Yet a disturbing phenomenon has emerged that could not only reverse any gains we’ve made, but also encourage the spread of a newly resistant form of the disease. Read More »
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Government Leadership On Antibiotic Resistance — In Europe
A few pieces of news relative to antibiotic resistance caught my eye over the past few days. What they all had in common: Highly placed politicians stating unambiguously that antibiotic resistance should be a national and international priority...
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Here's Why Africa's Ebola Epidemic Is Officially 'Spiraling Out of Control'
Health authorities admitted Tuesday that the West African Ebola virus epidemic is accelerating quickly and may soon outpace the ability of medical teams to contain it. Meanwhile, the grim situation is being made worse by a massive strike among Liberian health care workers, who have accumulated large amounts of unpaid wages while suffering from overwork and the constant risk of exposure...
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Hiding Our Heads in the Sand - Why the US is Unprepared for Pandemics and Disasters
A new report from the Trust for America's Health minces no words. President and CEO John Auerbach charges: COVID-19 has shined a harsh spotlight on the country's lack of preparedness for dealing with threats to Americans' well-being. Years of cutting funding for public health and emergency preparedness programs has left the nation with a smaller-than-necessary public health workforce, limited testing capacity, an insufficient national stockpile, and archaic disease tracking systems - in summary, twentieth-century tools for dealing with twenty-first-century challenges.
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L.A. County Patient Was Infected with Drug-Resistant E. coli
Scientists were alarmed last year when they found that a woman in Pennsylvania had been infected with bacteria that was resistant to colistin, an antibiotic that is considered the last line of defense against particularly nasty illnesses. It was a scary reminder that bacteria are increasingly able to survive antibiotics, making some infections extremely difficult or even impossible to treat. Now California is on a list of six states where patients have been infected with bacteria that contains a gene known as mcr-1, which makes it resistant to colistin...
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Peer into the Post-Apocalyptic Future of Antimicrobial Resistance
Aout 4 million years ago, a cave was forming in the Delaware Basin of what is now Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. From that time on, Lechuguilla Cave remained untouched by humans or animals until its discovery in 1986—an isolated, pristine primeval ecosystem. When the bacteria found on the walls of Lechuguilla were analyzed, many of the microbes were determined not only to have resistance to natural antibiotics like penicillin, but also to synthetic antibiotics that did not exist on earth until the second half of the twentieth century...
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Peer into the Post-Apocalyptic Future of Antimicrobial Resistance
Aout 4 million years ago, a cave was forming in the Delaware Basin of what is now Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. From that time on, Lechuguilla Cave remained untouched by humans or animals until its discovery in 1986—an isolated, pristine primeval ecosystem. When the bacteria found on the walls of Lechuguilla were analyzed, many of the microbes were determined not only to have resistance to natural antibiotics like penicillin, but also to synthetic antibiotics that did not exist on earth until the second half of the twentieth century...
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Report on ONC's Public Health Data Systems Hearing: Ensuring a Data-Driven Response to COVID-19
As part of HHS's response to President Biden's Executive Order on Ensuring a Data-Driven Response to COVID-19 and Future High-Consequence Public Health Threats, ONC's Health Information Technology Advisory Committee (HITAC) recently held an expert panel hearing to understand the performance of public health data systems during the COVID-19 pandemic response and other gap areas in current infrastructure ... Forthcoming recommendations from the Public Health Data Systems Task Force will identify and prioritize policy and technical gaps to be addressed in order to help ensure a more effective response to future public health threats. These recommendations are expected to be issued later this summer.
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Superbugs Spread Across U.S.
As Americans worry about Ebola, the swiftly spreading virus that has traveled from West Africa to Texas, a more silent killer poses a greater danger...Drug-resistant bacteria killed 23,000 people in America last year and caused 2 million illnesses...
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The Underreported Side Of The Ebola Crisis
Amid the media accounts of the worst Ebola outbreak ever recorded some significant context is largely missing from the major media reporting. Atop this list are links of the outbreak to the climate crisis and global inequality, mal-distribution of wealth, and austerity-driven cuts in public services that have greatly contributed to the rapid spread of Ebola...
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US Provides $40 Million To Tackle Infectious Diseases
Developing countries will receive extra support to prevent, detect and respond to health threats as the US government announced plans last month (13 February) to boost funding for nations at high risk from infectious disease. Read More »
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VA Top Scientist Worries That Ebola Has Mutated To Become More Contagious
...[Peter Jahrling] has been watching this Ebola epidemic with a mixture of horror, concern and scientific curiosity. And there's one thing he's found particularly worrisome: the mutations of the virus that are circulating now look to be more contagious than the ones that have turned up in the past...
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We May Have Reached The 'Apocalyptic Scenario' With Antibiotics
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Tom Frieden made headlines last year when he proclaimed that the United States would "soon be in a post-antibiotic era," meaning we'd be plagued by everyday infections that our drugs could no longer handle...
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