Here are five recent thoughts from Dr. Frieden on what may be “the single most important infectious disease threat of our time.”
1. “We must take action now to stop this completely preventable disease,” Dr. Frieden wrote of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in a column for Fox News. There were nearly half a million cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis globally in 2015 and 50,000 cases of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, according to World Health Organization estimates. Patients diagnosed with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis will receive 15,000 pills and 250 injections over the course of two years to combat the infection, he wrote. The drug used to treat the infection can have permanent side effects including liver damage and hearing loss, not to mentions the outrageous cost of treatment. Inaction will see more and more cases of the difficult-to-treat infections.
2. The disease knows no borders, Dr. Frieden told The Huffington Post in an interview Friday. “We risk turning the clock back on antibiotics … if we don’t improve our control efforts,” he said.
3. Although incidents of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis have been drastically reduced in the U.S., cases continue to pop up around the world and there’s nothing to stop the bacteria from making its way back here, Dr. Frieden told The Huffington Post.
4. Though tuberculosis is 100 percent curable, it still claims 1.5 million lives around the world, Dr. Frieden said in a December address to the House of Representatives. To prevent those deaths, the world must innovate and improve the application of proven tools combat the threat.
5. “Antibiotic resistance may be the single most important infectious disease threat of our time,” Dr. Frieden said in a Wednesday interview with the American Public Health Association. “But we can delay, and sometimes even reverse, the spread of antibiotic resistance by becoming better stewards of these essential life-saving medications. Last June, the [Obama] Administration proposed critically needed investments for an aggressive, coordinated approach that — if implemented — could prevent thousands of antibiotic-resistant infections and deaths and save billions of dollars in medical costs.”
More articles on infection control:
FDA moves to halt shipping from device manufacturer linked to patient deaths
CMS launches 3-year pilot project to improve infection control assessment for hospitals
Putting patient safety and quality data where you might not expect it: Johns Hopkins Medicine goes performance-transparent with dashboards
