Daily Policy Digest
Health Issues
September 18, 2008
BEATING THE GERM INSURGENCY
Antimicrobial drugs are designed to fight infectious diseases, but the germs are fighting back -- and winning. Worse, the public has failed to grasp the global health threat posed by infectious diseases that are resistant to therapeutic drugs. Our complacency will be costly -- and surely deadly, warns the RAND Institute.
Antimicrobial resistance, or AMR, magnifies the threat from major infectious diseases for which there are therapeutic drugs but no vaccines: Malaria, tuberculosis (TB), HIV, diarrheal diseases and acute respiratory diseases. Compared with treating infections that respond well to ordinary treatments, treating drug-resistant infections is generally more difficult, more expensive and not as successful, says RAND:
- A case of malaria once could be treated with a single drug for about eight cents; now, because of resistance, treatments can cost as much as $35.
- About five percent of nine million new cases of TB are resistant to at least two of the four standard drugs used.
- Treatment for drug-resistant TB costs about 200 times more than standard treatment and still results in lower cure rates.
Moreover, drug resistance is due in large part to antimicrobial drug misuse, including:
- Doctors prescribing too low of a dose for too short of a time, or the wrong drug.
- Patients sometimes improperly self-medicate or demand inappropriate treatment.
- Drug quality is uneven.
- Poor hospital infection control and the inappropriate use of antibiotics in food animal production also contribute.
- Compounding the problem, market forces have led to lagging innovation in antimicrobial drugs.
Source: Melinda Moore, "Beating the Germ Insurgency," RAND Review, Summer 2008.
For text:
http://www.rand.org/publications/randreview/issues/summer2008/horizon09.html
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