Dear All, Last week I went to New York City to see one of the opening performances of Lifeline, The Musical, the world’s first musical telling the story of penicillin, Sir Alexander Fleming, and the rise of antibiotic resistance! This was my first time seeing the production in its entirety and it did not disappoint. The timing
Dear All, Novel antibacterial agents, vaccines, and diagnostics will do little if they are not widely available and used responsibly. CDDEP’s recent report entitled “The State of the World’s Antibiotics in 2021” makes this very clear: “… more people in LMICs (low-middle-income countries) die from lack of access to antimicrobials than from resistant infection.” Hence, CARB-X has
Dear All (and with thanks to Vega Masignani for co-authoring this newsletter), Waaaay back in 2019 (pre-COVID … remember that?), Wellcome put out a call for grants focused on understanding the value of vaccines in combatting AMR (4 June 2019 newsletter entitled “Why vaccines for AMR? What is their value? Grant opportunity for research on
Dear All, D-Day and the momentous Normandy landings were 81 years ago today. In a marvelous new article on bbc.com (and with thanks to Mike Hodges for pointing it out), we can read about how “Handwritten notes reveal Churchill’s penicillin concern ahead of D-Day.” The magic of penicillin was evident … but there wasn’t enough of
Dear All (and with a wonkish alert!), The idea of more (and better) vaccines to prevent (or even be part of treating) bacterial infections has long intrigued. We certainly do have several good bacterial vaccines, but why not more? As part of this ongoing discussion, I really enjoyed a paper that came out back in
Dear All (unapologetically wonkish … very important material!), Let’s set the scene today by considering two quotes: Prosaic: “The successful treatment of patients with cancer has long depended on the capacity to manage infectious complications.” (Shropshire 2025, cited below) Blunt translation: “Your cancer will be controlled, but then you may die of infection.” (Abdul Ghafur,
Dear All (with thanks to Louise for co-authoring and with a wonkish alert … settle in for the ride!), Today’s newsletter discusses the intersection of three themes around antibiotic access. Recall first how the paper by Baraldi et al. (1 Dec 2024 newsletter) taught us that there are at least six variations to the idea
Dear All, We often talk about the problem of lack of access to new antibiotics. In late 2021, for example, we explored data showing that multi-year delays in access to new antibiotics were common even in high income countries (19 Aug 2021 newsletter with YouTube discussion). But as we’ll learn today, that analysis considers only one
Dear All, Back in 2022, I wrote a newsletter about the World Health Organization putting out a call to form a Task Force of AMR Survivors. The Task Force of Antimicrobial Resistance Survivors was established last October and its members have been busy ever since! There are currently 12 members, each serving 2 years, and they
Dear All (Wonkish alert! Not technical but lengthy … so settle in and enjoy the ride!): Regular readers will know of my fascination with language: e.g., this 20 Feb 2020 newsletter entitled “Language Matters: CRE vs. CPE; SDD vs. I; And MDR, XDR, PDR, UDR vs. DTR.” How about that for acronymics taken to Olympian