Antimicrobial Resistance (Burma/Myanmar)

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Individual Documents

Creator/author: Anna Tomasulo
Source/publisher: HealthMap
2012-04-12
Date of entry/update: 2016-08-16
Grouping: Individual Documents
Language: English
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Description: "...The global medical community struggles with the unnecessary prescription of antibiotics. It can potentially harm a patient to give medicine that isn?t needed, and another big fear is that antibiotic-resistant bacteria will be created when medicines are inappropriately used. From a public health and safety perspective, it can be argued that one of the greatest advances in medicine in the past decades has been learning when not to prescribe antibiotics. Western countries are to be respected for their efforts to stop the dispensing of bacterial antibiotics to patients who most likely have a viral infection, and therefore won?t benefit from the pills. However, from a global health standpoint, the low-hanging fruit for changing the behaviour of physicians to combat antibiotic resistance occurs in countries like Myanmar. Almost all physicians in Yangon are aware that we doctors prescribe antibiotics excessively. Even more ominous is the widespread selling of antibiotics from the thousands of places in Myanmar that offer pharmaceuticals in their shop fronts..."
Creator/author: Christoph Gelsdorf
Source/publisher: "Myanmar Times"
2014-12-08
Date of entry/update: 2016-08-16
Grouping: Individual Documents
Language: English
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Description: "Resistance to the drug that has saved millions of lives from malaria has been detected over a wider area than previously thought, scientists warn. The ability of the malaria parasite to shrug off the effects of artemisinin has been spreading since it emerged in South East Asia. Tests, published in Lancet Infectious Diseases, now show this resistance on the verge of entering India. Experts said the development was "alarming" and an "enormous threat". Deaths from malaria have nearly halved since 2000, and the infection now kills about 584,000 people each year. But resistance to artemisinin threatens to undo all that hard work, and it has been detected in: Cambodia Laos Thailand Vietnam Myanmar, also known as Burma Blood samples from 940 people with malaria from 55 sites across Myanmar showed this resistance was widespread across the country. One site, in the Sagaing region, showed that resistant parasites were just 25km (15 miles) from the Indian border..."
Creator/author: James Gallagher
Source/publisher: BBC News website
2015-02-20
Date of entry/update: 2016-08-16
Grouping: Individual Documents
Language: English
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Description: Summary: " Resistance to the antimalarial drug artemisinin is established in Myanmar and has reached within 25km of the Indian border, a new study reports. Artemisinin resistance threatens to follow the same historical trajectory from Southeast Asia to the Indian subcontinent as seen in the past with other antimalarial medicines."
Source/publisher: Wellcome Trust via ce DAily""Scien
2015-02-19
Date of entry/update: 2016-08-16
Grouping: Individual Documents
Language: English
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Description: "October 2013: A snapshot of the response to multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in Myanmar, a country seriously affected by this global threat. Can new diagnostic technology help make a difference? Featuring photos by renowned Asia photographer Gerhard Jörén...Multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) in Myanmar: ...Diagnosing drug-resistant TB: Why it matters... Until 2009, testing for the deadly strain of drug-resistant TB was done in just one laboratory in Myanmar, a country of over 50 million people. The only method available was over 100 years old and could take months to provide an accurate result. TB bacteria are spread through droplets in the air, so it is essential to get patients on treatment quickly before they can infect others. In Myanmar, around 180 000 people are thought to develop active TB each year. Just how many of these TB cases are resistant to the most important anti-TB drugs is hard to estimate, but close to 9000 people are diagnosed with multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) every year. Like normal TB, MDR-TB is spread from person-to-person. But while drug-sensitive TB can be cured with a six-month course of antibiotics, MDR-TB requires 24 months of highly toxic and costly medicines and injections. Myanmar now has access to high-tech diagnostic machinery that can revolutionize the response to drug-resistant TB. The new reality is impressive. State-of-the-art TB labs lie on the outskirts of dusty urban centres. In these carefully contained environments, lab workers use molecular approaches to detect drug-resistant TB bacteria, extracting bacterial DNA from sputum samples. Going a step further, Myanmar was recently chosen by the World Health Organization to launch a global roll-out of a new and advanced TB diagnostic machine known as GeneXpert (pictured right), which can provide a result for MDR-TB diagnosis in just 90 minutes. These compact devices are now being installed in labs and TB centres throughout the country..."
Source/publisher: UNITAID
2013-10-00
Date of entry/update: 2016-08-16
Grouping: Individual Documents
Language: English
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