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Antibiotic Resistance: A Call to Action to Prevent the Next Epidemic of Inequality
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the deadly impacts of structural racism and systemic health inequalities on racial and ethnic minorities in the USA. Black and Hispanic/Latinx populations have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, accounting for nearly half of the cases and 37% of the deaths so far, despite making up less than a third of the US population. This stark imbalance has highlighted the need to examine the role of racial and ethnic disparities in shaping health outcomes, particularly with respect to Antimicrobial Resistance, say Levy CIMAR’s Drs. Maya Nadimpalli and Shira Doron.
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With Ticks Spreading Across the Country, the CDC Says There May Be Nearly Half a Million Cases of Lyme Annually
Between 2010 and 2018, the U.S. had approximately 476,000 cases of Lyme disease every year, according to the CDC. That number is substantially higher than the CDC’s previous estimates, of about 300,000 annual Lyme cases. Linden Hu, MD, of the Tufts Lyme Disease Initiative, notes that the true number of cases of Lyme disease probably varies widely from one year to the next based on changes in tick density in different areas, weather patterns, and more. Still, he says, \u0022there certainly are a lot of cases, and based on the spread of tick range, and things like that, we do anticipate that there’s an upward trend.\u0022
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Levy CIMAR's Amy Pickering Joins Berkeley Faculty
Amy Pickering, PhD, has joined the faculty at UC Berkeley as Assistant Professor in Development Engineering, a joint Blum Center-College of Engineering appointment made possible through a generous gift from Richard C. Blum and an anonymous donor. There, she is also the Blum Center Distinguished Chair in Global Poverty and Practice. Pickering, formerly a Tiampo Family Assistant Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Tufts University and a distinguished member of the Levy CIMAR, is now a Levy CIMAR Affiliate Member as of January 2021.
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Opinion: Can Breastfeeding Protect Against Antimicrobial Resistance?
The proportion of infections among young children that are antimicrobial-resistant is increasing across the globe. Newborns may be colonized with enteric antimicrobial-resistant pathogens early in life, which is a risk factor for infection-related morbidity and mortality. Levy CIMAR Core Faculty Members, Maya Nadimpalli, PhD, Amy Pickering, PhD, and colleagues say that breastfeeding and human milk supplements deserve greater attention as potential preventive measures in the global effort to combat AMR, particularly in low- and middle-income settings. Recent evidence supports the role of breastfeeding in preventing the acquisition, establishment, and proliferation of enteric pathogens, including AMR bacteria.
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Opinion: To Defeat COVID-19, We Must Acknowledge the Fear it Engenders
\u0022My career as a hospital epidemiologist has been based on science and evidence, which I believed to be the touchstones of my work,\u0022 says Levy CIMAR Core Faculty member Shira Doron, MD. \u0022But COVID-19 has taught me that fear — gut-wrenching, all-consuming fear, like the fear of dying from a horrific respiratory virus — can be much more powerful than science. We can’t conquer this fear unless we acknowledge and respect it. I’m no stranger to my work keeping me awake at night. In pre-pandemic times, I sometimes lost sleep over issues like a spike in staph infections in a particular intensive care unit. Now I lie awake worrying about keeping patients safe from COVID-19.\u0022
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Levy CIMAR's Helen Boucher, MD, on SARS-CoV-2 Vaccines
Massachusetts could receive enough doses of Pfizer’s vaccine by Christmas to vaccinate 300,000 people. How significant is that number? And how quickly could it slow our rate of new cases? According to Levy CIMAR Director Helen Boucher, MD, Chief of Infectious Diseases at Tufts Medical Center: \u0022That is a significant number. It is a larger number than we had expected, so this is good news. I do think we have to temper that with understanding it is going to take weeks to months before we reach the levels of immunity that will stop the spread of the virus. I think our estimates of some time to the spring and summer next year before we reach that 60-70% to allow us to get back to everyday activities is still reasonable.\u0022
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Webinar: Addressing HIV Drug Resistance to Protect the Effectiveness of HIV Treatment
Over the past decade, the world has witnessed unprecedented scale-up of antiretroviral therapy (ART) which has saved the lives of tens of millions of people. As of December 2019, 25.4 million people out of an estimated 38 million people living with HIV were receiving ART globally. Increased use of ART has, not unexpectedly, been accompanied by the emergence of some degree of HIV drug resistance, the levels of which have steadily increased in recent years. Join the WHO and experts in the field including the Levy CIMAR’s Michael Jordan, MD, for a webinar on \u0022Addressing HIV drug resistance to protect the effectiveness of HIV treatment\u0022 in celebration of World Antimicrobial Awareness Week.
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Here's Why a Negative COVID-19 Test Doesn't Guarantee You Can Safely Gather on Thanksgiving
If you’re planning on relying on a COVID-19 test as the go-ahead before spending Thanksgiving with people from other households, experts say that doesn’t necessarily ensure the virus won’t spread. \u0022A test is just one point in time,\u0022 said Levy CIMAR Director Dr. Helen Boucher, chief of infectious diseases at Tufts Medical Center. \u0022The incubation period for this virus is 14 days. Just because someone tests negative today doesn’t mean they won’t be positive tomorrow or in the next 13 days.\u0022 A large dinner in which people from different households sit closely together indoors, maskless, could create a \u0022perfect storm\u0022 for COVID19 spread, she said.
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Experts Warn Antibiotic-Resistant 'Superbugs' Could Be Next Public Health Epidemic
The global COVID-19 pandemic has been raging on for months, but some experts warn another health crisis is looming: Antibiotic-resistant bacteria or so-called \u0022superbugs.\u0022 Levy CIMAR Director Dr. Helen Boucher said drug-resistant infections have grown significantly in the past 10 years due to antibiotic overuse and misuse. She said some doctors are overprescribing drugs and some patients are not taking them properly. \u0022We shouldn’t ask for antibiotics for things like colds which are caused by viruses and for which antibiotics won’t help,\u0022 Boucher said. \u0022We should really take them, these precious medicines, exactly as prescribed so we can do our part to prevent more resistance.\u0022
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Treating COVID-19 Patients Leads to Short Supply of Certain Common Drugs
According to the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, caring for COVID-19 patients is causing shortages of that drug and several others, including heart medication norepinephrine, albuterol inhalers which are often used by asthma patients, certain antibiotics and propofol, a sedative used to calm patients while they are intubated. \u0022Just like testing materials, medical equipment and PPE, drugs — even the ones we commonly use for everyday medical conditions and hospitalized patients — are in short supply since the pandemic began, and all of those shortages have the potential to negatively impact the care of patients in Boston,\u0022 said Levy CIMAR’s Dr. Shira Doron, an epidemiologist with Tufts Medical Center.
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Levy CIMAR's Shira Doron on Why Rising COVID-19 Levels in Wastewater is Concerning
Tufts Medical Center Hospital Epidemiologist and Levy CIMAR Core Faculty Member Dr. Shira Doron discusses the increase in COVID-19 cases in Massachusetts, the role of social gatherings in spreading the virus, coronavirus in wastewater, and shortages of critical drugs in her weekly appearance on WCVB. ‘The data suggests that right now, every infected person is on average transmitting the infection to more than one other person,\u0022 says Doron. \u0022 Therefore, if we change nothing at all, we can expect to see the numbers continue to rise faster and faster. The time is now to double down on those efforts to avoid situations.\u0022
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How Researchers are Revamping Antimicrobial Drugs
There’s a long road from discovering a potential drug to getting it approved for human use. Levy CIMAR’s Bree Aldridge, Ph.D., thinks the process could be speeded up by using a computerized imaging system that looks at how bacterial cells are deformed by a drug. Such changes can give hints as to what part of a cell’s biology the drug is acting on. \u0022We think we know what a drug does, but then if you look at how it actually destroys the cells, we can sometimes see that it’s a little bit different,\u0022 Aldridge says. \u0022This sort of method allows us to rapidly determine whether a drug is acting like known drugs or whether a drug is doing something that’s novel.\u0022 If it’s novel, it might be a class that bacteria are not yet resistant to.