Dear All: Two things today. First, Maryn McKenna has provided the community with an excellent brief perspective on the incentive problem. Entitlted “Antibiotics May Soon Become Useless. Now What?” and published in Wired, she uses the recent approval of omadacycline (Nuzyra) as a springboard to discuss the paradox of antibiotics. She quite logically extends the idea of antibiotics as fire
Dear All: Verbatim comments from interviews with 12,000 people in Germany, India, Japan, Kenya, the UK, the USA and Thailand: India: “[Antimicrobial resistance] is quite normal, no big thing, like malaria. It’s on a personal level, if you take antibiotics, your resistance will be on [the] lower side. If you are fit, your body resistance is more.” Germany: “Air pollution
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, Today’s topics all share the theme of Less Talk, More Action! Here we go… First up … news from the US. I’ve written before about tweets from US CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services) administrator Seema Verma (link) on the need for changes in antibiotic reimbursement as well as the very concrete steps taken in
Dear All, 3 Apr 2020 update: Significant additional details on the pilot were shared via a 29 Mar 2020 webinar (link to newsletter) and then a FAQ document (link to newsletter). The game is definitely afoot! The hoofbeats of the cavalry bringing us the UK NHS antibiotic subscription model are definitely getting louder! As you
Dear All, Long note alert! There are two deep and deeply connected topics to share today. Refresh your coffee and settle in… Today’s first topic: Adding to the recent reviews of the clinical stage pipeline for both traditional products (link to the Sep 2019 Pew Charitable Trusts summary), and non-traditional products (link to an Aug 2019 newsletter summarizing
Dear All, Long note alert: Set aside at least 30 minutes for this one … there’s a lot of important material here. Last week’s workshop entitled “Enhancing the Clinical Trial Enterprise for Antibacterial Drug Development in the United States” was an unusual and unusually instructive meeting. You can go here for the meeting materials but as there are
Dear All, To start your week, we have three tidbits for consideration. First, results from a trial entitled “Colistin versus meropenem in the empirical treatment of ventilator-associated pneumonia (Magic Bullet study): an investigator-driven, open-label, randomized, noninferiority controlled trial” have been published (Critical Care 23:383, 2019, link). Cisneros et al. sought to enroll 496 subjects into this trial but
Dear All: IDSA and Research!America have worked together to conduct a broadly representative opinion poll in the United States regarding AMR. The project was supported by Pfizer and surveyed 1,004 adults in the US during October 2018. Key results: Less encouraging but probably an improvement from the past, 1/3rd of respondents thought antibiotics were effective
Dear All: Cassini et al. have just published a truly scary paper. Here’s the bulk of the abstract … I can’t improve on it. Methods: We estimated the incidence of infections with 16 antibiotic resistance–bacterium combinations from European Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance Network (EARS-Net) 2015 data that was country-corrected for population coverage. We multiplied the number of bloodstream
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