Several weeks ago, CDDEP launched a new series to elucidate trends in global health through graphs, charts, and other visualizations. This week's graphic breaks down trends in global macrolide antibiotic sales, and offers some interesting insights regarding macrolide use in the United States.
Earlier this week, the FDA announced new restrictions on the use of cephalosporins in livestock – big news for an agency that just before the holidays withdrew two 1977 proposals to restrict certain uses of penicillins and tetracyclines in animal feed and food-producing animals.
It’s been a fall of mixed news on antibiotic use in the agricultural industry in the United States. Advocates of restricting the practice balked at the FDA’s rejection, in November, of two citizen petitions enlisting the agency’s help in banning certain uses of antibiotics for livestock due to concerns about emerging antibiotic resistance.
The GrantWatch blog at Health Affairs has a new post detailing some initiatives from CDDEP's Extending the Cure project: antibiotic use visualizations on ResistanceMap and the Drug Resistance Index. An excerpt of the post is below - read it in its entirety on the Gran
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has put out a call for research to develop a novel kind of bacteria-fighting mechanism, and it was the focus of the most recent Science Friday. It’s nanotechnology’s response to antibiotic resistance, and it involves little bits of RNA, attached to nanoparticles, that can “turn off” antibiotic resistance within bacterial cells or stop replication.
Two big updates this week. First, ResistanceMap has released its first ever interactive visualizations on antibiotic use. The new maps show trends in outpatient prescribing across the United States over time, and viewers can sort data by geography (at the state level) and/or antibiotic class. You can check out the new visualizations in the "antibiotic use" module found here.
CDC's annual Get Smart About Antibiotics week has arrived and the agency has kicked it off by announcing a pilot program to track antibiotic use in hospitals. The mechanism works through the National Healthcare Safety Network and will initially target 70 hospitals through four health departments.
New data released in Pediatrics this week describes the prevalence of antibiotic prescribing in pediatric ambulatory care visits. Antibiotics are prescribed in just over 20% of such visits, with a majority of these prescriptions for respiratory conditions. Broad-spectrum antibiotic use is prevalent, accounting for 50% of all prescriptions.
ResistanceMap - an online tool for visualizing antibiotic resistance from Extending the Cure - launches a second edition today with more bacteria-antibiotic combinations, U.S.-Canada-Europe comparisons of resistance trends, and lots of opportunities to interact with the data. Read the press release below, and take a look at some initial coverage on The Scientist and the Washington Post's