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Health Expert Urges Parents to Minimize Play Dates Amid Coronavirus Fears
With schools shut down across the Bay State for the next three weeks in an attempt to stop the spread of the coronavirus, parents are faced with the tough question of whether or not to let their kids socialize. CIMAR’s Dr. Helen Boucher is urging families to think small when it comes to playdates.
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More Of Your Questions About The Coronavirus, Answered
CIMAR Director Dr. Helen Boucher, Chief of Geographic Medicine and Infectious Diseases at Tufts Medical Center, and Dr. Joshua Barocas of Boston Medical Center and the Boston University School of Medicine joined WBUR to answer listener questions about COVID-19/Novel Coronavirus.
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Coronavirus Cases Are On The Rise In New England
The number of coronavirus cases in Massachusetts is climbing. CIMAR Director Dr. Helen Boucher, Chief of Geographic Medicines and Infectious Disease at Tufts Medical Center, joined WBUR’s Morning Edition host Bob Oakes to help put the numbers in perspective.
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W.H.O. Warns That Pipeline for New Antibiotics Is Running Dry
In two new reports, the global health agency says only government intervention can fix the broken market for new antimicrobial drugs. “We can’t have more companies going bankrupt,” said CIMAR Director Dr. Helen Boucher, an infectious disease specialist at Tufts Medical Center and a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria. ” If the pipeline remains this anemic, that’s going to have real implications for our patients.”
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Heroic Motorized Molecules Drill Superbug Full of Holes
All manner of fancy ideas have been floated to kill the superbug, when what we’ve needed is a hero willing to go toe-to-toe with these pitiless, heavily-armored bacteria. And here it is: a seek-and-destroy motorized molecular drill that is activated by light to “spin at three million rotations per second” – and ruthlessly disembowel the enemy outright. Notably, the world’s first single molecule electric motor was developed at Tufts University’s School of Arts and Sciences in 2011.
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Antibiotic Makers Struggle, Hurting War on Superbugs
One of America’s biggest antibiotics specialists, Melinta Therapeutics Inc., filed for bankruptcy in late December, citing slow sales growth and high costs. Other makers might soon face a similar fate, saying their cash will run out before the end of 2020. “We don’t know the fate of those drugs for our patients,” said CIMAR Director Helen Boucher, chief of infectious diseases at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. “As a physician, that’s my biggest concern.”
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Deadly Superbugs Pose Greater Threat Than Previously Estimated
Drug-resistant germs sicken about 3 million people every year in the United States and kill about 35,000, representing a much larger public health threat than previously understood, according to a long-awaited report released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The new estimates show that, on average, someone in the United States gets an antibiotic-resistant infection every 11 seconds, and every 15 minutes, someone dies.
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‘Superbug’ Infections are on the Rise, a New CDC Report Says
We see people from everyday life, who are young and otherwise healthy, who get a MRSA \\[methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus\\] infection on their skin, says CIMAR Director Dr. Helen Boucher. We want to have diagnostic tools and medical treatments for problems we know we’re going to have, she said. But we also need to prepare for the kind of resistance that we could never predict. We know from history that bacteria and mother nature are smarter than we are.
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New Antibiotics Needed “Yesterday” to Tackle Drug-Resistant Infections, Says CIMAR Director
When Roxana Sudderth’s son, Trey, a healthy high school freshman, developed a sore on his foot after playing basketball, it just looked like a small blister. Doctors gave him antibiotics, but the pain persisted. Sudderth took him to the hospital where they told her he had a life-threatening infection, MRSA, a bacterium resistant to antibiotics. Over 19 days, his condition deteriorated until finally doctors told Sudderth it was time to take Trey off life support.
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Unlocking Biological Materials for Better Therapies
Researchers at Tufts’ Laboratory for Living Devices (L2D) link materials like silk and paper with technology, medicine, and diagnostics. CIMAR and L2D faculty member, Dr. Bree Aldridge, and her team are using biomaterials made of silk to engineer programmable diagnostic platforms—or petri dishes of the future—to fight antimicrobial resistance by gathering more detailed information about susceptibility to multiple drugs.
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Wellcome Trust Report Urges Better Antimicrobial Resistance Messaging
A new report suggests clinicians, public health professionals, and journalists need to rethink the way they talk about antimicrobial resistance to increase public understanding and promote action by policy makers. In this article, CIMAR Director Dr. Helen Boucher acknowledges that while it is challenging issue to explain to the public, stakeholders haven’t done a great job of communicating the immediacy and severity of antimicrobial resistance.
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Is the Gene-Editing Tool, Crispr, the Next Antibiotic?
Desperate to find new medicines against pathogenic microorganisms, scientists are turning to Crispr, which has typically been considered for macroscopic tasks: altering mosquitoes so they can’t spread malaria, editing tomatoes so they are more flavorful and curing certain genetic diseases in humans. Now researchers are harnessing Crispr to turn a bacterium’s machinery against itself, or against viruses that infect human cells.