At their 64th General Assembly in Brazil, the World Medical Association adopted a statement on Fungal Disease Diagnosis and Management’. The statement reads: “The WMA stresses the need to support the diagnosis and management of fungal diseases and urges national governments to ensure that both diagnostic tests and antifungal therapies are available for their populations…. Read more »
New burden estimates from France, Jamaica, Mongolia, Korea, Sri Lanka, The Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago, Iran, Guatemala and Zambia – covering a total of 262 million people, have been presented at the Trends in Medical Mycology conference on Oct 11-13th in Copenhagen. Previously, estimates of the number of people suffering and dying from fungal… Read more »
About 2 billion people have no access to modern medicines, according to the Access to Medicines Foundation’s Founder and CEO Wim Leereveld. In a perspective piece in the New England Journal of Medicine, Hans Hogerzeil of Groningen, also in the Netherlands, reviews the 2012 index rankings of the major global pharmaceutical companies in terms of… Read more »
Mycetoma is a chronic, progressively destructive morbid inflammatory disease usually of the foot but any part of the body can be affected. Infection is most probably acquired by traumatic inoculation of certain fungi and bacteria into the subcutaneous tissue. Mycetoma was described in the modern literature in 1694 but was first reported in the mid-19th… Read more »
In a study of nearly a million Danish pregnant women of whom 7352 were exposed to fluconazole and 687 to itraconazole in the first trimester, Ditte Molgaard-Nielsen and colleagues from the Serums Staten Institute in Copenhagen found a 3-fold increase in the heart defect tetralogy of Fallot and a 2-fold increase in hypoplastic left heart… Read more »
Following the Francis report into the breakdown of care in the NHS system in Mid Staffordshire hospitals, David Cameron requested Don Berwick a renowned international patient safety expert to form an advisory group, to guide the changes required within the NHS to ensure patient safety. The Berwick report describes some of those problems (view report). Among… Read more »
A Manchester doctor believes the lives of tens of thousands of people worldwide who develop a deadly type of fungal meningitis could now be saved thanks to a U- turn by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Professor David Denning, who is recognised as an international expert in infectious and fungal diseases, has campaigned with others… Read more »
Ketoconazole, the world’s first oral azole antifungal, is being retired by the FDA. First launched by Janssen Pharmaceutica (Belgium) in 1985, it transformed the treatment of oral and oesophageal candidiasis and some endemic mycoses such as coccidioidomycosis. This week, the FDA restricted its use to the occasional patient with endemic mycoses, as a last resort…. Read more »
Researchers in Toronto and Manchester estimate that 4,837,000 adults with asthma have allergic bronchoplulmonary aspergillosis or ABPA, which usually improves substantially with antifungal treatment. Their work, published today in the journal Medical Mycology, has re-estimated the total number of asthmatics worldwide – a remarkable 193 million, of whom 24 million live in the USA, 20… Read more »