Posts By: Graham Atherton

Formerly Managing Director of IDA Foundation in the Netherlands, the world largest not for profit Essential Medicines Supplier, Henk is a pharmaceuticals supply chain expert.  His most recent role has been with the Partnership for Supply Chain Management which provides drug procurement for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), focused on antiretroviral agents… Read more »

“Millions of children are denied the right to healthcare and an education because of who they are and where they live”. Today marks the launch event of the ‘Every Last Child’ campaign from Save the Children. The aim of the campaign is ensure that even the most marginalised and vulnerable children have what they need to… Read more »

Major country differences in serious fungal diseases were found in the latest 5 countries to have their burden estimated – Japan (population 127M), Bangladesh (population 162M), Malaysia (population 30M) Peru (population 31M) and Congo (population 4.4M). These estimates were presented at the Advances Against Aspergillosis meeting in Manchester (March 3-5) and European Congress on Clinical… Read more »

The Indian Health Minister, Kaul Singh Thakur has declared that the state government will provide free antifungal medicines to below poverty line patients. Speaking at the 11th National Conference of the Society of Indian Human and Animal Mycology at Kufri, the minister said the government was committed to include the common fungal diseases component in planning,… Read more »

The following open letter has been issued by GAFFI: To the World Health Organisation, UNAIDS, Pan-American Health Organisation, Médecins Sans Frontières, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative, UNICEF, national public health agencies and governments. A recent rough estimate of disseminated histoplasmosis in AIDS is 100,000 cases worldwide and 80,000 deaths, mostly… Read more »

GAFFI has progressed its mission to reduce illness and death associated with fungal diseases worldwide during 2014/15, its second year of operation. The disabling and stigmatising fungal tropical skin disease ‘Chromoblastomycosis’ has been added to GAFFI’s five priority diseases. GAFFI’s key activities have included: ‘95-95 by 2025’ 10 year Roadmap: GAFFI has drawn up a… Read more »

 Newsweek highlighted the plight of the truly neglected disease cryptococcal meningitis last week. “Crypto, a fungal infection of the brain and spinal cord, is a threat primarily to people living with HIV/AIDS. A so-called opportunistic infection, it preys on those who lack access to the antiretroviral therapy that can keep HIV in check. Infection occurs… Read more »

The global health tragedy that is avoidable deaths from histoplasmosis, has been highlighted in the current edition of the Journal AIDS (AIDS 2016, 30:167–170). Despite a burden of ~1,600,000 HIV patients in South and Central America, most hospitals have no access to rapid diagnostic techniques and often lack the right treatment. Histoplasma capsulatum is endemic and… Read more »

The world’s first guidelines for CPA have been published in the European Respiratory Journal by the ERS in conjunction with ESCMID. The guidelines cover the important features of this disease & comprehensive treatment and recommendations  for chronic pulmonary aspergillosis (CPA). This disease is fatal in about 80% of sufferers who succumb to this illness when their lungs… Read more »

In their latest UK report on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR), Lord O’Neil and colleagues call for massive restraint in the use of both antibiotics in farmed animals and azole fungicides on crops. They call for “new classes of clinical antifungals that are developed in the future should be banned from use in food production. There might… Read more »