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BY Dan Ferber • POSTED April 7 2011 AT 11:57 am

On April 7 the World Health Organization will step up its battle against tiny but powerful foes: disease-causing microbes that resist the drugs meant to kill them. The theme of the WHO’s World Health Day this year—a global public-service announcement on health, essentially—is combating antimicrobial resistance.

It’s about time, says Rachel Nugent, Ph.D., WHO’s deputy director for health at the Center for Global Development (CGD). Too many key drugs are losing their effectiveness, and as a result tens of thousands of people are dying needlessly,occhiali ray ban online, and many more are unnecessarily ill for weeks, months, or even years.
Well-meaning donors from rich countries could help. They already donate millions of dollars for years to stop infectious diseases like tuberculosis, AIDS and malaria. Most of that money has gone to deliver disease-fighting drugs to poor parts of the world—an effort that has saved many lives. “For years it’s been all about getting the drugs out there, and not about making sure drugs are efficacious and remain so,ray ban wayfarer,” Nugent says.
Encouraging efforts are under way to accomplish that goal, Nugent says. Professional groups now educate doctors and nurses not to prescribe key antibiotics needlessly, which is why doctors in the developed world will now resist prescribing them for a cold or ear infection. In Africa, a medical professional group called the International Society of Chemotherapy is connecting doctors with medical laboratories to help track the spread of drug resistant microbes,Chloe Sunglasses6iRFLunettes Tom Ford en soldes, and get them the correct medicines.
Also in Africa, medicine vendors are being trained to educate patients. In Tanzania, for example, such vendors often take the place of pharmacists, often selling medicine out of roadside stands in poor, rural areas, Nugent says. A new national law requires those vendors to be certified by health authorities. If the vendors educate themselves and their patients about when and how to properly take antiviral drugs (usually for AIDS) or other medicines, they get special privileges and can sell more medicine.
But there’s a lot more that can and should be done, Nugent emphasizes.
She and CGD recently assembled 29 drug-resistance experts from universities, non-profit health organizations, governments, and pharmaceutical companies, and asked them to report back on the best ways to tackle the global rise of drug resistance. The group deliberated two years, then issued a report last June with recommendations to keep crucial drugs effective and save lives.
For starters, health officials worldwide need to do a better job tracking resistant microbes,discount ray ban, and drug resistance experts should pool their data to get a global bead on a global problem, the group found. For example, at least a dozen groups have been tracking antibiotic resistance—government agencies like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; private philanthropies like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which runs a network that tracks malaria parasites that resist today’s first-line antimalarial drugs, and Merck, the pharmaceutical giant. By pooling data and collaborating, they’d be better able to track problem microbes and identify drugs that are beginning to fail.
The CGD working group called for stronger efforts to stop inappropriate use of medicines, along the lines of the Tanzania effort. “We need to ensure drugs are good quality and get to people in a way that they’ll be used properly,” Nugent says. Funders and donors, such as the United States, and the Bill & Melissa Gates Foundation, should pay attention to drug resistance, “rather than just worrying about getting the drugs out there,” she adds.
Scientists who work on drug resistance in different diseases need to reach out and talk with each other, the CGD working group found. “Scientists work best when collaborating. It will speed up innovation,” Nugent says. Finally, new antibiotics and antivirals are also needed to kill resistant bugs. The pharmaceutical industry has been slow to develop such drugs, so in January the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a new center to create medicines. This is a bold venture for the typically cautious health research agency, but Nugent sees it as a positive development.
“They’re recognizing that we don’t have enough new drug candidates emerging from the commercial sector,” she says. They realize there’s a public interest—a social good that’s not being developed.”
Have you or someone you know ever battled a drug-resistant infection? Do you think antibiotics are overprescribed?
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Learn more by reading the Center for Global Development’s report, “The Race Against Drug Resistance,” which you can download here. Read more about NIH’s new drug research center here.