Dear All: I’ve written a lot about the need for pull incentives, preferably delinked (some papers to read, comments by TATFAR, highlights from Davos 2018, and the UK commits to trying delinkage). Now, I am delighted to report that a really serious effort is underway in the US to make something happen during the 116th Congress. The essential document can be
Dear All: Today we have a new pipeline summary from the Pew Trusts and news about important global scorecards from JPIAMR (Joint Programming Initiative on AMR) and the Access to Medicine Foundation (ATMF). These ideas may seem very distant, especially if you spend your days working at a lab bench, but in truth these are the
Dear All: I would like to draw your attention to a superb new book by William Hall, Anthony McDonnell, and Jim O’Neill. The names of the authors may be familiar as Jim O’Neill chaired the UK AMR Review and William Hall and Anthony McDonnell were two of the members of the core team who produced the Review’s seven excellent reports on
Dear All, Clear analyses by our colleagues in the science-focused media are invaluable ways to educate both ourselves and others: we learn new viewpoints while our non-technical friends and colleagues learn what keeps us up at night. On this note, we have two recently released 30-minute podcasts that are very much worth hearing and sharing.
Dear All, I’ve been hearing rumors about this report for a couple of weeks but now it’s out! The US CDC has released their 2019 update to their 2013 Antibiotic Resistance report. Go here for the full report. This report is clearly a labor of love on the part of Team CDC — the graphics, the patient
Dear All, In a marvelous series of tweets, Seema Verma (current Administrator of the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) today said the following (emphasis is mine): Not-so-fun fact of the day: Most classes of antibiotics prescribed to #Medicare beneficiaries were discovered long ago- before they were even born. #FactFriday #DYK Over time, pathogens have
Dear All: Two links to share today. First, we have a report to the UK House of Commons by their Health and Social Care Committee. This is a well-written summary of the core problem, the economic challenge for pharma, and the varied issues around resistance in human health, animal health, and the environment. Relevant to this community, we
Dear All: Rick Bright, Director of BARDA, posted an outstanding commentary (link) in Forbes on 10 May 2019 on the Achaogen story (for more background, see my prior Scary/Scarier/Scariest blogs #1 and #2). Here are three excerpts from his commentary: “Since 2010, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) has been a leader in the fight against
Dear All, First, Alan Carr’s Sep 2019 Antibiotic and Antifungal Update (link) is, as usual, required reading (see also this prior blog). Key highlights: He provides an updated by-month sales report from Jan 2016 through Jul 2019 of all products approved since 2009. Sadly, it remains the case that only 4 drugs have sold more than $100m in the
Dear All: Recently announced is a new EU Joint Action on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) & Health-Care Associated Infections (HCAI). Its acronym is EU-JAMRAI and the website is https://eu-jamrai.eu/. Joint actions are a common tool for coordinating implementation activities across Europe. EU-JAMRAI actually started in September 2017 and will run for three years but it is really