Posts By: Graham Atherton

In 2013, 1,500,000 people died of AIDs according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) report, and 3,000,000 HIV-infected people globally are at increased risk of acquiring a life-threatening fungal infection. Each year an estimated, 700 000 deaths (47%) due to fungal disease in AIDS were estimated – twice as many deaths as… Read more »

GERMANTOWN, Md. — On October 12, 2016 — The HealthWell Foundation®, an independent non-profit that provides a financial lifeline for inadequately insured Americans,  announced that it opened a new fund to provide assistance to patients who are at-risk, or infected with, potentially life-threatening fungal infections, specifically Aspergillosis and Candidiasis. Through the fund, HealthWell will provide… Read more »

Last November, the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon called for a report on Innovation and Access to Health Technology, and set a High-Level Panel to do this. This report came out in September 2016, entitled “Promoting Innovation and Access to Health Technology”. • WHY WAS THE REPORT NEEDED? There have never been more medicines and… Read more »

Call is issued for improved diagnosis and treatment of fungal infections. GENEVA: 24th October 2016. Fungal infection causes around half of AIDS-related deaths, of which there were 1,100,000 in 20151.  A first of its kind analysis – ‘Modelling reduction in AIDS deaths’ by the University of Manchester’s Professor David W Denning2 and published today in… Read more »

Experts in Manchester have now developed the world’s first Fungal Microscopy online course. It is aimed at doctors, clinical scientists and laboratory technologists across the world, and because it is online, students in poorer countries where the need for information is greatest will now be able to learn how to recognize many serious pathogenic fungi…. Read more »

The world is in the grip of a global crisis that kills the equivalent of the populations of Philadelphia, Kampala or Prague, – around 1.6 million each year. A new report published today in the esteemed Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, documents how many countries do not have life-saving antifungal therapies. Fungal infections attack the lungs… Read more »

At the EMBO Mycoses in AIDS meeting in Cape Town, Dr Joe Jarvis working in Gabarone, Botswana questioned the value of 90-90-90 in reducing cryptococcal meningitis.   Just published in the prestigious journal Lancet HIV, is Botswana’s record in rolling our 90-90-90 antiretroviral therapy.  Botswana achieved: 83·3% individuals knew their HIV status, among these 87·4%, were… Read more »

At the Russian-Chinese conference on Medical Microbiology and Clinical Mycology in St Petersburg, GAFFI’s President, Professor David Denning outlined the massive opportunity to save many lives from AIDS. In 2014, UNAIDS estimated that there were 1.2 million deaths from AIDS, ~400,000 attributable to TB. Four fungal infections probably account for over 500,000 deaths a year… Read more »

In the USA an alarming trend for pharmaceutical companies to purchase marketing rights for aged off-patent drugs and then immediately raising the cost of the generic medication extortionately by as much as 5433% has been highlighted in an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine (Alpern, Son & Stauffer, 2016). A much publicised case… Read more »

Lord Jim O’Neill’s global Review on AMR has set out its final recommendations, providing a comprehensive action plan for the world to prevent drug-resistant infections and defeat the rising threat of superbugs – something that could kill 10 million people a year by 2050, the equivalent of 1 person every 3 seconds, and more than… Read more »