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 »
A three-way randomised study (1) of cryptococcal meningitis in Vietnam has convincingly shown the benefit of flucytosine with amphotericin B. Jeremy Day and 22 colleagues in Ho Chi Minh City at the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit studied 299 patients, all with AIDS and cryptococcal meningitis and found that the 100 patients who received amphotericin B (1… Read more »
Better outcomes for AIDS patients with cryptococcal meningitis are in prospect following a crucial sharing and planning meeting in Geneva, March 18-19 2013. At the instigation of the US Centres for Disease Control, attendees from LIFE, WHO, Medicines Sans Frontieres (MSF), Clinton Health Access and numerous universities and public health institutions, the key barriers to access to… Read more »
Today the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) issued a risk assessment report on azole resistance in Aspergillus spp. and its possible link to environmental usage of azole fungicides. An increase of strains of Aspergillus causing serious human infection showing resistance to azole antifungals has been detected in several European countries although the number of studies is… Read more »
As Chronic Pulmonary Aspergillosis (CPA) may follow TB in about 10% of cases, discussion on establishment of coordination with the work of the WHO’s STB Department is important. Mario Raviglione, (Director), an Infectious Diseases physician originally from Italy who trained in the USA in Boston and New York in the early AIDS era, described CPA as one… Read more »
On December 20th, in the prestigious journal “Science Translation Medicine”, Gordon Brown and his colleagues describe the numbers of people with various life-threatening fungal infections and the major development and research needs which are required to improve diagnosis, treatment and survival. They estimate there are over 200,000 cases of invasive aspergillosis; >400,000 cases of invasive… Read more »
Fungal skin diseases came out the 4th most prevalent disease worldwide at the Global Burden of Disease 2010 launch conference in London on December 14th 2012. Hosted at the Royal Society and chaired by Richard Horton (Editor the Lancet), Christopher Murray (Institute for Health metrics and Evaluation, Seattle) and Richard Peto (University of Oxford). Over… Read more »
