Nature: Use antimicrobials wisely Peter S. Jørgensen, researcher at the Global Economic Dynamics and the Biosphere at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and colleagues “…Tackling [antibiotic] resistance urgently requires the scaling back of the massive overuse of antibiotics to secure the liveability of Earth in the long term. ……

TIME reports on evidence along the Thai-Cambodia border that the malaria parasite is gaining resistance to artemisinin – “the only remaining effective drug in the world’s arsenal against malaria’s most deadly strain.”

“Two years after some $22 million in donor funds were pumped into malaria control along the Cambodia-Thailand border to fight off suspected resistance to treatment, health workers say the battle is not over,” IRIN reports, adding, “The government reported 103,000 malaria infections and 151 deaths nationwide in 2010. A year later, 85,000 reported infections led to 93 deaths — a 38-percent decline in mortality.” “‘If you take your foot off the … [accelerator] we can lose everything we have done in the past two to three years,’ Steven Bjorge, anti-malaria team leader in Cambodia for the [WHO], told IRIN in February 2012,” the news service writes.

“One in 10 cases of tuberculosis in China cannot be treated by the most commonly-used drugs, driven by a lack of testing and misuse of medicine, according to a national survey that showed for the first time the size of the drug-resistant epidemic,” the Associated Press reports (Wong, 6/7). “‘In 2007, one third of the patients with new cases of tuberculosis and one half of the patients with previously treated tuberculosis had drug-resistant disease,’ said the study in the New England Journal of Medicine,” Agence France-Presse reports, adding, “Even more, the prevalence of multi-drug resistant [tuberculosis (MDR-TB)] in new cases (5.7 percent) was nearly twice the global average, said the study” (6/6).

In a study published on Wednesday in the Lancet, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that “[a]mong 1,278 patients who were resistant to two or more first-line tuberculosis drugs in Estonia, Latvia, Peru, Philippines, Russia, South Africa, South Korea and Thailand, 43.7 percent showed resistance to at least one second-line drug,” which “suggest[s] the deadly disease may become ‘virtually untreatable,'” according to the study, Bloomberg Businessweek reports (Kitamura/Narayan, 8/29). “In about a fifth of cases, they found resistance to at least one second-line injectable [versus oral] drug,” according to Reuters, which states “[t]his ranged from two percent in the Philippines to 47 percent in Latvia.” Overall, 6.7 percent of patients had extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB), meaning patients are resistant to the first-line drugs isoniazid and rifampicin as well as drugs in the fluoroquinolone antibiotic class and a second-line injectable antibiotic, Reuters adds, noting “[r]ates in South Korea, at 15.2 percent, and Russia at 11.3 percent, were more than twice the WHO’s global estimate of 5.4 percent at that time” (Kelland, 8/30).

“[O]ften seen in the wealthy West as a disease of bygone eras,” Reuters examines rising rates of tuberculosis (TB) — drug-resistant TB in particular — among the world’s rich and poor. “[R]apidly rising rates of drug-resistant TB in some of the wealthiest cities in the world, as well as across Africa and Asia, are again making history,” Reuters writes. According to the news service, “London has been dubbed the ‘tuberculosis capital of Europe,’ and a startling recent study documenting new cases of so-called ‘totally drug-resistant’ TB in India suggests the modern-day tale of this disease could get a lot worse.”

“Over the past six years, my research group has sampled thousands of medicines used to treat tuberculosis, malaria, and major bacterial infections in emerging markets,” Roger Bate, author and adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, writes in a Foreign Policy opinion piece, noting “just over five percent of products failed…

Media outlets on Thursday continued to write about the WHO’s new tuberculosis (TB) report, published Wednesday. “The Global Tuberculosis Report 2013 … confirms that the world is on track to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) target of reversing TB incidence, along with the target of a 50 percent reduction…

Seattle Times: Gates Foundation battling big new threat in malaria fight “…With more than $2 billion committed, the [Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation] is the leading private supporter of research into new treatments, vaccines, diagnostic tools, disease mapping, and other weapons to fight malaria. This research should help the foundation…

New York Times: A Key Malaria Drug Becomes Less Effective “The parasite that causes the most deadly form of malaria is becoming more resistant to the most effective drug used to treat it, scientists in Southeast Asia are reporting…” (Bakalar, 8/4).