The U.S. government has tapped pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline to create new antibiotics meant to fight the rise of drug-resistant bacteria and safeguard against bioterrorism. The first-of-its kind public-private partnership could be worth up to $200 million when all is said and done.

The deal may raise some eyebrows considering GSK’s massive corporate resources and recent controversies surrounding the company’s marketing practices and safety procedures. Last year, GSK plead guilty to criminal charges for promoting off-label drug use and not reporting safety data for a popular diabetes medication. The British drug maker also paid $3 billion to the Justice Department in a fraud settlement.

But officials consider the unusual arrangement between GSK and the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) necessary because pharmaceutical companies have few financial incentives to invest in antibiotic production:

The problem of antibiotic resistance and the rise of so-called “superbugs” that cannot be treated with traditional medicines has been growing for years, but drug companies have been reluctant to invest in new medicines because of poor returns.

Patients tend to take antibiotics for only a short period, prices are traditionally low and any new antibiotics are likely to be reserved for serious infections – once again minimizing the sales opportunity.

David Payne, head of GSK’s antibacterial discovery unit, said public-private partnerships, like the one with BARDA, were a key part to solving the problem.

The government’s decision reflects just how concerned public health officials are about the rise of so-called “superbugs” such as carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE). Some scientists predict that CRE alone could kill half of all people who contract it since it can withstand even the toughest antibiotics.

Professor Dame Sally Davies, England’s chief medical officer, has recently warned that without the production of effective new drugs to fight these types of bacteria, the human species could be looking at a world in which seven percent of all hospital admissions stem from a drug-resistant infection — a problem that she has compared to global warming in its scope and potential to undermine worldwide health. “It’s a ticking time bomb,” she told England’s The Independent.

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U.K. public health officials are racing to contain a rash of measles outbreaks among older British children that threatens to spread the highly contagious disease throughout the country. The budding epidemic has been linked to a debunked 1998 anti-vaccine study that caused U.K. vaccination rates against measles to plummet.

In 1998, a team of British scientists led by Dr. Andrew Wakefield published a widely rebuked paper that incorrectly linked the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine with autism. The study, which received widespread attention at the time, led many British parents to forgo their children’s MMR shots — something that is possible in the U.K. since schoolchildren aren’t subject to mandatory vaccination laws as they are in the United States.

The vaccine exodus led to a sharp decline in MMR immunization — from 90 percent of all children to just 54 percent in a year — and its consequences are now coming into full view, as unvaccinated British teenagers spread measles by the thousands:

This year, the U.K. has had more than 1,200 cases of measles, after a record number of nearly 2,000 cases last year. The country once recorded only several dozen cases every year. It now ranks second in Europe, behind only Romania.

The majority of those getting sick in the U.K. — including a significant number of older children and teens — had never been vaccinated. [...]

Across the U.K., about 90 percent of children under 5 are vaccinated against measles and have received the necessary two doses of the vaccine. But among children now aged 10 to 16, the vaccination rate is slightly below 50 percent in some regions.

To stop measles outbreaks, more than 95 percent of children need to be fully immunized. In some parts of the U.K., the rate is still below 80 percent.

By contrast, the U.S. — where measles immunization rates are above 90 percent — reported just 55 cases of measles last year.

Still, Americans tend not to get their vaccinations if they can help it. While U.S. school attendance is generally contingent on a variety of shots for highly contagious diseases, others such as the yearly influenza shot and HPV vaccine aren’t, leading the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to call American immunization numbers “unacceptably low.” Politicians and public officials who parrot discredited conspiracy theories similar to the Wakefield study contribute to that trend.

Mental health issues affect approximately 20 percent of the kids in the United States, according to a first-of-its-kind report from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The CDC, which partnered with several other federal agencies to study data on childhood mental illness between 2005 and 2011, say they expect that rate to increase even further in the coming years.

The mental health issues that affect children include attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, mood and anxiety disorders, behavioral disorders, substance abuse, and Tourette Syndrome. The CDC found that ADHD was the most commonly reported mental disorder, affecting about 4.2 million children between the ages of 3 and 17. About 1.2 million children in that age group are battling depression, and about 678,000 fall somewhere on the autism spectrum. And an estimated 40 percent of children who have been diagnosed with a disorder actually suffer from multiple different mental health issues.

The CDC estimates that treating those mental health issues costs the U.S. about $247 billion each year. But that actually represents just a fraction of what the nation should be spending, since less than a quarter of the children living with mental disorders are receiving the treatment they need:

Although the prevalence, early onset and effect on society make childhood mental problems a major public health issue, only 21 percent of affected children get treatment because of a shortage of pediatric sub-specialists and child and adolescent psychiatrists, according to the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

“Our current health care system does not meet the needs of these children,” Martin J. Drell, the group’s president, said last week in a statement about the problem.

Making matters worse, fewer medical students are opting for careers in children’s mental health, while the current crop of professionals is aging out of the workforce. The dearth of providers means troubled youngsters in underserved rural and urban areas are less likely to get timely care.

“Children with serious medical conditions should not have where they live determine what kind of health care services they receive,” said Thomas K. McInerny, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Researchers say their new report represents the first comprehensive look at mental health issues among children. “This report is a reflection of what’s happening in the nation as a whole,” one of the report’s authors, Dr. Ruth Perou, told the Daily Beast. “We’re finally opening a dialogue on mental health.”

After a series of recent mass shootings, there has been renewed interest in these kind of national discussions regarding mental health issues. Indeed, the U.S. has a long way to go in this area. Half of mentally ill Americans are currently skipping out on treatment because they can’t afford it, partly because mental health care providers don’t always accept private insurance. This problem was exacerbated by the recent economic downturn, which led many states to slash billions of dollars in funding from their mental health programs. Predictably, as those mental health services have disappeared, the prison population has skyrocketed. A recent survey of Texas’ juvenile detention facilities found that the rate of mental illness exceeds the rate of gang membership among teen prisoners there.

Fortunately, there has been some legislative movement in this area. At the beginning of this year, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) held a series of hearings on the dire state of youth’s mental health services, and introduced a measure to strengthen school’s resources for identifying and treating kids’ mental disorders.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Monday took steps to ensure that consumers are aware of the cancer-related risks of using commercial tanning booths. In its proposed rule, the FDA wants the booths “to carry language warning people under the age of 18 about the risks of indoor tanning” and “require manufacturers to meet certain safety and performance requirements before marketing their devices.”

If given final approval, tanning booths would also reclassify the machines themselves to “moderate-risk” products, and give the FDA more power to change their design to make them safer for public use:

Medical groups like the American Academy of Dermatology have been urging the U.S. government to take action on tanning beds for years, citing increases in the number of cases of skin cancer among women in their teens and twenties. Dermatologists say indoor tanning advertisements directly appeal to teenagers’ desire to be attractive.

Currently the machines are classified as low-risk devices, in the same group as bandages and tongue depressors. By increasing their classification to moderate-risk, or class II, devices the FDA proposal could limit the levels of radiation the devices emit and make other changes to their design.

The move comes in the wake of lobbying by public health and medical advocacy groups concerned with the ballooning rates of lethal skin cancers like melanoma. The incidence of such cancers has been steadily rising over the last three decades, and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) expects over 75,000 Americans to be diagnosed with melanoma this year alone. Clearer warnings on the risks of commercial tanning by American youth is particularly important given that “people who begin tanning younger than age 35 have a 75 percent higher risk of melanoma” and the reality that less than 11 percent of tanning facilities followed FDA’s safety schedule limiting young people’s use of the beds to three times a week at most — in fact, the vast majority of such facilities “would allow teens to use their facilities all seven days for the first week.”

Several states — including Vermont, California, and New Jersey — actually have outright bans on under-18 tanning due to the associated public health risks. Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) recently vetoed a bill that would enact the same restrictions in his state, parroting tanning bed producers’ and tanning salon owners’ argument that it could actually be riskier for kids to get their tan on in regular sunshine, which also exposes them to UV rays. Those claims were debunked in a 2010 American Association for Cancer Research study, which concluded that the more concentrated rays use in tanning beds are actually more dangerous than normal sunlight.

Malaria kills hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people every year. It’s the fifth-leading killer in the developing world, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). And according to a worrying new study, a new strain of the disease is evolving that resists the treatment typically used to combat it — just as budget cuts in the United States are cutting off massive amounts of funding for research to develop new drugs.

The study, published on Sunday in Nature Genetics, documents “several distinct…parasite subpopulations” in Western Cambodia that differ in many respects, but share resistance to to artemisinin, the key ingredient in artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs), the dominant type of drug cocktail used to fight malaria today. This finding represents the first formal scientific documentation of artemisinin-resistant malaria in the region, though reports of such a strain have been trickling in since 2008.

Struggles with drug-resistant malaria is nothing new in the fight against malaria: the disease has always periodically developed resistances to new drugs, and the WHO developed a plan to fight the spread of ACT-resistant malaria in 2011. A well-funded global anti-malaria campaign has helped to significantly reduce the disease’s lethality over the past decade.

However, the emergence of drug-resistant malaria is particularly concerning today, as sequestration in the United States is choking off one of the world’s most important sources of research and development funding. According to the Global Health Technologies Coalition, sequestration will slash roughly $1.5 billion from the National Institutes of Health alone. Combined with automatic cuts to other agencies, like the Food and Drug Administration, this will translate into an across-the-board cut of between 5 and 7.8 percent for global health research. That’s hundreds of millions, potentially billions, of dollars from the world’s largest source of government funding for malaria research. The United States government more than five times more funding for malaria research than any government, accounting for over half of all government dollars worldwide. The NIH alone provides 20 percent of all — state, private, and philanthropic — global research dollars.

And the urgent need for response to drug-resistant strains isn’t limited to malaria. Global health organizations are running out of funding to find a response to drug-resistant tuberculosis, another disease that kills millions of people worldwide per year. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) is desperately warning about a lack of adequate research devoted to so-called “superbugs,” mutated deadly diseases that also resist antibiotic responses.

Meanwhile, budget cuts in Greece have led to the country’s first malaria outbreak “in decades.”

Since March, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has been ramping up its warnings about the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria — especially carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), a dangerous “superbug” that could potentially kill half of all people who contract it. Addressing this impending global health threat requires creating robust new antibiotics that can kill superbugs, and that’s part of the reason that the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) launched a “10×20″ initiative to develop 10 new bacteria-busting drugs by the year 2020. Unfortunately, scientists now say they are likely to fall far short of that goal, raising concerns that global health institutions won’t be ready for a worldwide bacterial epidemic if it were to strike.

In modern times, antibiotics are largely taken for granted. But this complacent public attitude ignores the reality that such treatments require years — if not decades — to develop. Antibiotics also have limited shelf lives, since bacteria evolve and adapt to them. That wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that there have been zero major new antibiotics developed in the last 25 years, leaving the global community susceptible to the rise of drug-resistant bacteria:

While a new infectious disease has been discovered nearly every year over the past 30 years, there have been no new antibiotics since 1987, leaving our armory nearly empty as diseases become resistant to existing drugs.

“The barriers to approval of nine additional antibiotics by 2020 seem insurmountable,” said Henry Chambers, chair of IDSA’s Antimicrobial Resistance Committee (ARC).

“We’re losing ground because we are not developing new drugs in pace with superbugs’ ability to develop resistance to them. We’re on the precipice of returning to the dark days before antibiotics enabled safer surgery, chemotherapy and the care of premature infants. We’re all at risk,” said Helen Boucher, from IDSA.

The most frightening aspect of all this is the fact that there’s no way to tell when a disastrous bacteria epidemic might strike — or whether we will be ready for it when it does. There are only seven drugs in development for treating superbugs like CRE, and there is no guarantee that any of them will prove effective or be approved for general use before it’s too late. Professor Dame Sally Davies, England’s chief medical officer, described antibiotic resistance as a public health “ticking time bomb,” and warned that the world population could be looking at a future in which seven percent of all hospital admissions are taking place due to drug resistant infection. “Antibiotics are losing their effectiveness at a rate that is both alarming and irreversible — similar to global warming,” she told British newspaper The Independent.

There are few policy actions that would successfully address this crisis. Mostly, Congress’ options are limited to increasing funding for research organizations, putting pressure on scientists to act on the urgency of the moment, and making sure that emergency response institutions are properly funded, well-prepared, and closely regulated. The Senate has taken action on some of these measures in the wake of public health crises such as Hurricane Sandy. But ultimately, it’s up to the efforts of scientists and major pharmaceutical companies to invest in the type of research that could eventually protect the world from a disaster.

Over the past several years, the cost of both brand-name and generic drugs has skyrocketed, forcing many Americans to struggle to afford the prescription medications they need. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control reports that the United States’ total out-of-pocket drug costs exceeded $45 billion in 2011. And according to the agency’s most recent National Health Interview Survey, one out of every five Americans has asked their doctor to prescribe a cheaper medication in order to lower their prescription costs.

Predictably, the high cost of drugs hits low-income and uninsured Americans the hardest. Nearly 25 percent of uninsured people didn’t take their prescription drugs as recommended in 2011, compared to about 19 percent of privately-insured people and 15 percent of those on Medicaid. And compared to wealthier Americans, poor and near-poor Americans were twice as likely to skip out on their medication in order to save money:

As the CDC points out, this data actually represents an important public health issue, since Americans who don’t take their medication as directed are risking “negative health outcomes.” The agency notes that the adults who don’t take their prescriptions correctly tend to have “poorer health status and increased emergency room use, hospitalizations, and cardiovascular events.” In fact, a recent report estimated that the Americans neglecting to stick to their prescription drug regimen are contributing to billions of dollars in wasteful medical spending, due to the increased medical care that those people end up requiring.

As Americans struggle to afford their prescription drugs, however, Big Pharma is reaping the profits. Last year, the 11 largest global drug companies raked in almost $85 billion.

Last week, the CDC released adjusted estimates for the number of U.S. children with lead poisoning. The findings — which incorporated a new, lower threshold for what qualifies as a safe amount of lead in the blood — showed that roughly half a million U.S. children between the ages of one and five have blood lead levels at or above the point for which the CDC “recommends public health interventions.” While public health officials agree that the numbers illustrate the need for more aggressive intervention and prevention initiatives, those efforts are running into a major barrier: congressional cuts to the CDC budget.

Excess lead in the blood causes developmental problems in the brain and kidneys, making young children particularly susceptible to its negative health effects. As such, regulating lead content in products such as paint and gasoline has been a major public health initiative since the early 20th century, with the Clear Air Act of 1970 paving the way for widespread national regulation through the Environmental Protection Agency. In 2008, the EPA strengthened its standards against airborne lead emissions by tightening acceptable rates to thirty times less than the previous level, and the CDC lowered the definition of what constitutes lead poisoning last May.

But as CBS News reports, that heightened scrutiny doesn’t necessarily result in the desired public health outcomes unless there’s sufficient funding for testing and prevention efforts. And Congress almost entirely eliminated that type of funding last year:

Those cuts represent “an abandonment of children,” said David Rosner, a Columbia University public health historian who writes books about lead poisoning.

“We’ve been acting like the problem was solved and this was a thing of the past,” he added. [...]

[It's] likely that many children with lead poisoning have not been diagnosed. In the CDC study, elevated lead levels were discovered for a third of the children only when they were tested by researchers.

“When you look for it, you find it,” Columbia’s Rosner said.

Once lead poisoning is diagnosed, doctors often refer parents to local health departments to get their homes checked out to try to find the source of the problem. But as demand for investigations grows, there’s less money to pay for them. Congress last year cut CDC lead program’s budget from about $29 million to $2 million. That ended CDC grants to local health departments for their programs.

As with most public health concerns associated with harmful substances, those budget cuts — and the excess lead levels — disproportionately affect low-income and minority communities that are more likely to live in older housing which hasn’t undergone proper retro-fitting operations. Detroit has been forced to essentially cut its entire lead safety program.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has just rolled out a new anti-smoking campaign highlighting the negative effects of tobacco-related illnesses. The agency wants to emphasize all of the ways that smoking can indirectly impact a wider circle of people, like smokers’ loved ones or people breathing in secondhand smoke in public places. CDC officials also hope to influence a demographic they are particularly concerned about reaching: the LGBT community.

Dr. Tim McAfee, the director of the CDC’s Office on Smoke and Health, told San Diego Gay & Lesbian News that curbing smoking rates among LGBT individuals is a major priority for the agency. Since the smoking rate is 70 percent higher in the LGBT community than it is for heterosexual Americans, McAfee pointed out that it represents a “big, big health burden” in the nation — and effectively addressing it is a matter of “health justice and equity”:

“We need to pull back the curtain on this issue,” McAfee said, stressing that HIV-positive people can expect a long lifetime if they take their medicine, exercise and avoid smoking. “Smoking itself is bad,” he added. “But when you mix in HIV, it’s … like adding kerosene to a fire.”

He blasted the tobacco industry for targeting LGBT people, particularly the youth, and contributing to the rise in smoking in the gay community.

“This is a health justice and equity issue,” McAfee said. “We at the CDC are committed to this cause.”

McAfee is referring to the fact that recent studies have suggested that smoking now poses a bigger threat to HIV-positive Americans than the virus itself does. More than 60 percent of deaths among HIV patients are associated with tobacco-related illnesses, compared with about 25 percent that are associated with complications from HIV.

Unfortunately, however, the smoking rates among the LGBT community are still disproportionately high. That’s partly because Big Tobacco has specifically worked to target LGBT individuals, who already tend to be particularly susceptible to smoking due to minority stress. And there hasn’t been enough work on the other side focusing on LGBT-specific smoking cessation programs. LGBT leaders often don’t cite smoking as a big public health concern for members of their community, despite the fact that tobacco contributes to at least 30,000 gay and lesbian deaths each year. Campaigns like the CDC’s may help start to change that public perception.

A huge body of scientific evidence has already proven that the recommended vaccination schedule for U.S. kids is perfectly safe. But some pervasive myths about vaccines still persist — partially driven by dangerous right-wing fearmongering on the subject. Hoping to convince parents not to buy into the conspiracy theories, scientists continue to release new studies proving that it’s safe for them to vaccinate their kids on schedule, and reiterating that there’s no discernible link between vaccines and autism.

Some parents wonder if their kids are receiving too many vaccines too soon, and try to space out their children’s vaccinations so there’s more time in between their shots. In fact, up to 40 percent of parents take matters into their own hands and follow their own vaccination schedule rather that the one recommended by the CDC. But experts from the Institute of Medicine — a panel that advises the federal government on health policy — hope to change their minds. A new report from the Institute of Medicine confirms that the current childhood vaccination schedule is nothing to worry about, and it’s not a good idea to refrain from following it:

But delaying shots only prolongs the time that babies and children are vulnerable to “devastating diseases,” says co-author Pauline Thomas, an associate professor of preventive medicine at New Jersey Medical School.

“There is ample evidence that it’s not safe not to follow the schedule,” Thomas says. “It’s well known that in places where vaccines are delayed or missed, that’s where we are beginning to see vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks.”

Although the majority of doctors stand firmly behind vaccination, the issue is hotly debated among parents, particularly those too young to remember scourges like measles, polio and whooping cough. To address parents’ concerns, the Institute of Medicine has conducted more than 60 studies of vaccine safety since the 1970s.

Since children are required to receive the bulk of their vaccination before entering kindergarten, most of their shots are concentrated in their toddler years. Children receive up to 24 vaccines by their second birthday, and end up getting vaccinated against 14 different infectious diseases by the time they’re five. But it’s not randomly assigned. The CDC’s schedule is based on scientific testing that takes into account children’s immune systems, what they’re exposed to at different stages of their lives, and how the antibiotics interact with each other in the human body.

Peter Hotez, a vaccine researcher at the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, explained to USA Today that parents’ fears are simply unfounded. “The concept that you are going to overload a child’s immune system by giving too many vaccines at once makes no sense,” Hotez said. “When you play with vaccine schedules, you are playing with fire.”

In the two centuries since vaccines were first developed, they have nearly eradicated over a dozen of what used to be the most common infectious diseases in the U.S. Some vaccines, like the flu shot, aren’t foolproof — but they can still help lower the risk. 90 percent of the U.S. children who died from the flu this past winter didn’t get vaccinated for it.