The Wall Street Journal examines a new effort to combat drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) In India, noting “[a]n international health initiative has brokered a landmark accord that aims to halve the price patients pay for advanced tests for a strain of tuberculosis that is resistant to standard drugs.” The news service…

Nigeria To Conduct Drug-Resistant TB Survey With Stop TB Partnership, USAID Nigeria is working with the Stop TB Partnership and USAID on a survey to diagnose and monitor the number of Nigerians with drug-resistant tuberculosis, Nigeria’s Guardian newspaper reports. Jonathan Jiya, the director of public health, said there are a…

Within the next few days, the WHO “will recommend that countries stop trying to test all suspected cases of swine flu, said Keiji Fukuda, the agency’s assistant director-general of health security and environment,” Tuesday during a conference call with reporters, Bloomberg reports.

Almost half of all artemisinin manufacturers and malaria-endemic countries are “failing to comply” with WHO requirements to sell the treatment in combination with other drugs, which is increasing the risk that malaria parasites will develop resistance to artemsinin, Nature reports.

“Tuberculosis has long been recognized as one of the biggest public health problems in North Korea, but there is a disturbing new development: much of the TB in North Korea is resistant to regular antibiotics,” K.J. Seung, deputy director for the Partners In Health project in Lesotho and a physician…

IRIN examines the issue of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in Myanmar, writing, “Inadequate detection and treatment are major obstacles and can result in cases of drug-resistant TB (DR-TB) such as MDR-TB, say health experts.” According to Peter Paul de Groote, Myanmar’s head of mission for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), “Drug-resistant TB…

“The U.S. faces ‘potentially catastrophic consequences’ if it does not act immediately to combat drug resistance which already kills an estimated 23,000 people a year,” the CDC warned in a report released on Monday, The Guardian reports (McVeigh, 9/17). “In [its] 114-page report, the agency detailed for the first time…

An outbreak of drug-resistant and particularly virulent strains of scarlet fever has infected nearly 550 people and killed two children in Hong Kong so far this year, about double the Chinese city’s average annual total, the Associated Press reports.

“An analysis of 30,000-year-old bacteria whose DNA has been recovered from the Yukon permafrost shows that they were able to resist antibiotics,” providing “the first direct evidence that antibiotic resistance is a widespread natural phenomenon that preceded the modern medical use of antibiotics,” according to a study in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, the New York Times reports.

Arjen Dondorp, deputy director of the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Research Unit at Mahidol University in Bangkok, Thailand, and colleagues discuss the need to combat antimalarial drug resistance in this New England Journal of Medicine opinion piece, writing, “Researchers, funders, and policy leaders must recognize the urgency of the problem, take action to address simultaneously several important knowledge gaps, and focus immediately on eliminating the threat of artemisinin resistance.”