Let’s play a thought experiment. Imagine that you’re a major pharmaceutical company, a public company, with shareholders that you answer to, and market analysts looking over your shoulder to see whether this quarter’s earnings are up to projections. Imagine that you want to make a new drug. Let’s make it an antibiotic, because — as [...]
I’m thrilled today to present another guest blogger: Dr. Brad Spellberg, associate professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and author of the new book Rising Plague: The Global Threat from Deadly Bacteria and Our Dwindling Arsenal to Fight Them (Prometheus Books). This new book is important reading for anyone [...]
The Infectious Diseases Society of America, the professional organization for ID physicians, is criticizing large grocery store and pharmacy chains for giving antibiotics away for free. (Yes, you read that right: Not generic, not cheap, free. Here is a Wall Street Journal Health blog post explaining the practice, which has become quite common over the [...]
The ICAAC-IDSA (48th Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy and 46th annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America) meeting ended a week ago, and I’m still thrashing my way through the thousands of abstracts.
Here’s my final, highly unscientific selection of papers that caught my eye:
* Evidence that the community-strain clone USA300 is [...]
As you might guess by the name, ICAAC (the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy) features much research on the pharma side of things. There were many research reports this past week on drugs at various stages that I was intending to write up for you, but I just noticed that Reuters got there [...]
The ICAAC-IDSA meeting has ended, but there are still many abstracts that I have not been through. While I pore over them, though, an interesting paper has just been published that somewhat contradicts earlier research on the presence of MRSA in meat. (Earlier posts are here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.)
The researchers, [...]
Physicians from Madrid reported today on what’s believed to be the first outbreak of MRSA caused by a strain that was resistant to linezolid, usually known as Zyvox, a relatively new and costly drug that is used for complicated MRSA infections and when older drugs fail.
Linezolid resistance in single cases has been recorded before — [...]
Here’s a piece of MRSA news from the ICAAC meeting (see the post just below) that is intriguing enough to deserve its own post.
US and Caribbean researchers have found preliminary evidence of the staph strain ST 398, the animal-origin strain that has caused human illness in the Netherlands and has recently been found in [...]
There are 15,000+ people at the 48th Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemistry (known as ICAAC – yes, “Ick-ack”) and 46th Infectious Diseases Society of America Annual Meeting, and at least half of them seem interested in MRSA. At the keynote address last night, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy [...]
Incentives for making new antibiotics: What would it take?
Comments closedGuest Q&A: Dr. Brad Spellberg and RISING PLAGUE
0 CommentsA timely reminder on using antibiotics well (and badly)
0 CommentsFinal report from ICAAC-IDSA 08 (news from ICAAC, 3)
0 CommentsNew drugs for MRSA, at various experimental stages
0 CommentsMicrobes in US meat, but no MRSA
0 CommentsOutbreak of Zyvox-resistant staph (breaking news from ICAAC 2)
0 CommentsST 398 in New York City – via the Dominican Republic?
0 CommentsBreaking MRSA news from the ICAAC meeting 1
0 Comments© 2013 Maryn McKenna. All Rights Reserved.
Website Design and hosting by Authors On The Web