CDC director warns of 'post-antibiotic era'

CDC director warns of 'post-antibiotic era'

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warns that the government needs to take immediate action before we live in a world where life-saving antibiotics are no longer effective.

“Every day we delay it becomes harder and more expensive to fix this problem,” said CDC Director Thomas Frieden Tuesday.

Frieden says the healthcare system needs to improve how it detects patients with drug-resistant infections, controls the spread of such infections, prevents them from happening in the first place and incentivizes drugmakers to develop new antibiotics.





“We talk about the pre-antibiotic era and the antibiotic era; if we’re not careful we will soon be in the post-antibiotic era,” he said. “And, in fact, for some patients and some pathogens we’re already there.”
The CDC is launching a new system this week that lets hospitals track all the antibiotics dispensed and look at real-time patterns of antibiotic resistance, so doctors can narrow down which antibiotics are most likely to work.

Frieden warns that 23,000 Americans die from drug-resistant infections annually. He also said hundreds of thousands of cancer patients rely on antibiotics after chemotherapy because their immune systems become compromised.

Even though Congress has passed laws to give drugmakers more incentives to develop new antibiotics, such as longer patent exclusivities and faster pathways to get their drugs on the market, they have been reluctant.

“From a strictly business standpoint, the terrible thing about antibiotics is they cure people,” Frieden said. “That’s not a model for a highly lucrative pharmaceutical product — you want a product that has to be taken for a long, long time.”

He said the government needs to work with the industry to come up with even more incentives to push antibiotic research and development.

The CDC says every hospital should have an “antibiotic stewardship program” that tracks how antibiotics are used to try minimize overuse of the drugs, which can lead to drug resistance.

“We’ve done a study that says about a third of all antibiotics used in this country are either unnecessary or inappropriate,” Frieden said.

Frieden also touted an initiative in the president’s budget to develop regional centers that would cost $150 million over five years. The centers would advise doctors if their patients have a drug-resistant infection faster and develop a bank of drug-resistant bacteria that drugmakers can use to develop new antibiotics.




Read more: http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/213011-cdc-director-warns-of-post-antibiotic-era#ixzz38IaWZevu

Which may be why the Chinese plague blockade.

Good read, Irish. I remember it. Well timed return. It looks like the Chinese prairie dogs are coming home to...

Vuja da?

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   Thanks(0)    Quote Reply Topic: Pneumonic Plague Shuts Down Whole Town in China
    Posted: August 04 2009 at 12:55pm
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,536289,00.html

BEIJING — A second man has died of pneumonic plague in northwest China, in an outbreak that prompted authorities to lock down a town where about a dozen people were infected with the highly contagious deadly lung disease, a state news agency said.

The World Health Organization office in China said it was in close contact with Chinese health authorities and that measures taken so far to treat and quarantine sickened people were appropriate.

The man who died Sunday was identified only as 37-year-old Danzin from Ziketan, the stricken town in Qinghai province, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

Danzin was a neighbor of the first person who died, a 32-year-old herdsman whose name was not given. Another 10 people, mostly relatives of the first deceased man, were infected and undergoing isolated treatment in hospital, Xinhua said in a report late Sunday.

The town of 10,000 people has been sealed off and a team of experts was sent to the area, the local health bureau said Sunday, warning that anyone with a cough or fever who visited the town since mid-July should seek treatment at a hospital.

A food seller surnamed Han at the Crystal Alley Market in Ziketan said authorities have said homes and shops should be disinfected and residents should wear masks when they go out. He said 80 percent of shops in the town were closed and prices of disinfectants and some vegetables have tripled.


"People are so scared. There are few people on the streets," Han said by telephone. "There are police guarding the quarantine center at the township hospital but not on the streets."

The situation in Ziketan was stable, said an official surnamed Wang at the local disease control center, who added the measures taken were "scientific, orderly, effective and in accordance with the law."

A woman who lives in Ziketan, who refused to give her name, said county officials distributed flyers and made TV and radio announcements on how to prevent infection. The woman contacted by phone said police checkpoints were set up in a 17-mile (28-kilometer) radius around Ziketan and residents were not allowed to leave.

Pneumonic plague is spread through the air and can be passed from person to person through coughing, according to the World Health Organization. It is caused by the same bacteria that occurs in bubonic plague — the Black Death that killed an estimated 25 million people in Europe during the Middle Ages.

Bubonic plague is usually transmitted by flea bite and can be treated with antibiotics if diagnosed early. Pneumonic plague is one of the deadliest infectious diseases, capable of killing humans within 24 hours of infection, according to the WHO.

People infected with pneumonic plague must be given antibiotics within 24 hours of first showing symptoms, while people who have had direct contact with those infected can protect themselves by taking antibiotics for seven days, according to the Web site of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

The WHO's spokeswoman in China, Vivian Tan, said China reported the first death and 11 other cases to the organization on Saturday.

"In cases like this, we encourage the authorities to identify cases, to investigate any suspicious symptoms among close contacts and to treat confirmed cases as soon as possible. So far, they have done exactly that, so at this point we don't have any additional advice," Tan said.

In 2004, eight villagers in Qinghai province died of plague, most of them infected after killing or eating wild marmots. Marmots are related to gophers and prairie dogs. They live in the grasslands of China's northwest and Mongolia, where villagers often hunt them for meat.

Medclinician"