tuberculosis

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'Virtual Doctors' Helping Patients in Zambia

Sean Coughlan | BBC | June 22, 2016

The idea of a "virtual doctor" project might sound rather futuristic. But the inspiration for this scheme to improve health services in Zambia began in very low-tech and unhappy circumstances. Huw Jones, working in Zambia as a safari guide, was driving a Land Rover along a road in a remote part of the country. He saw a trail of blood in the road, and his first reaction was that it might have come from an animal killed by a lion. But he came across a couple on a bike - the man riding and the woman carried on the handlebars. She was pregnant and bleeding heavily and they had been cycling for hours with the aim of reaching the nearest hospital, almost 60 miles away...

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Antibiotic Resistance Doesn't Just Make Bacteria Harder To Kill – It Can Actually Make Them Stronger

Bacteria can become drug-resistant in two ways – resistance can be natural, meaning that the genes conferring resistance are already present in the bacterial chromosome, or they can be acquired through mutation or by picking up antibiotic-resistance genes from other microbes. It is now possible to use new DNA-sequencing technologies to take a closer look at how the antibiotic resistance can make some bacteria weaker or stronger. And in a new study, we found that – contrary to conventional wisdom around antibiotics – resistance can actually make some bacteria fitter and even more virulent.

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Drug Resistance Grows Menacingly

Nana Taona Kuo | Bangkok Post | December 21, 2015

Every five minutes a child in Southeast Asia dies from an infection caused by drug-resistant bacteria -- a situation that is likely to get worse. Anti-microbial resistance, which happens when micro-organisms become less susceptible to antibiotics, is making diseases more difficult to contain and harder to cure. Diseases we no longer fear, such as pneumonia and tuberculosis, are re-emerging as major killers, as the tools we use to fight them become less effective.

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Gates Foundation’s Strict Open Access Policy may have Domino Effect

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a major supporter of health and development research, is to introduce an open access policy next month for the studies it funds that goes further than most other research funders. The policy “will enable other researchers to access the latest evidence and draw on it to advance their own research” to help tackle malnutrition, infectious diseases, and child and maternal mortality, writes Trevor Mundel, the foundation’s president of global health, on the organization's website.

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How Community Health Centers Support Patient-Centered Care

Sara Heath | Patient Engagement HIT | August 21, 2017

Each year, HHS celebrates Community Health Centers week. It is a time where the agency recognizes the impact community health centers have on patient-centered care and how they promote access to care in vulnerable or medically underserved populations...

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Medicines for Malaria Venture Releases Report on how R&D Partnerships Serving Neglected Communities have Developed Dozens of Life-Saving Innovations Since 2010

Press Release | Medicines for Malaria Venture | January 28, 2021

The public-private initiatives that contributed to COVID-19 vaccine and drug development have showcased a model for accelerating biomedical innovation. This is another powerful example of how public-private partnerships have established themselves as powerhouses for fighting global health threats. According to a new report launched today from a group of 12 product development partnerships (PDPs), over the last decade, such alliances have brought to market 66 new drugs, vaccines, diagnostics and other technologies for a number of diseases—including tuberculosis, malaria, HIV, meningitis and sleeping sickness. These innovations have reached and benefitted more than 2.4 billion people in low-income countries.

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Mobile Technology for Community Health (MOTECH) Suite

Mobile Technology for Community Health (MOTECH) Suite is an open source enterprise software package designed by the Grameen Foundation to connect popular mHealth technologies to strengthen healthcare systems by streamlining patient data collection and improving patient engagement. MOTECH has the capacity to reach illiterate patient populations as well as patient populations in rural areas and works by connecting frontline worker systems such as CommCareHQ, eHealth systems such as OpenMRS and DHIS2, and communication systems such as IVR, SMS, and email to improve healthcare delivery. The MOTECH platform is designed to work effectively in low-resource settings, apply to a broad range of health domains, and meet the needs of large patient populations.

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MOTECH: How An Open Source SMS Medical Platform Is Improving Patient Engagement and Reaching Underserved Populations in Developing Nations

Implementation of the MOTECH Suite is spreading rapidly among government health services and humanitarian organizations that address the health of potentially vulnerable or at-risk populations across the globe. As an open source solution, MOTECH affords a number of advantages for health services, particularly in low resource areas of the world. Organizations or individuals who work with software solutions to healthcare-related humanitarian issues will need to know what MOTECH is, how it works, and how it might be used to improve the health of various populations...

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Open source EHR platform tailored to treat Ebola patients

Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | August 23, 2017

An open-source electronic health record system developed to treat Ebola patients during the recent epidemic in West Africa is being touted as a potential solution for clinical data collection in highly infectious environments and resource-constrained healthcare settings. Implemented two years ago at Save the Children International’s Kerry Town Ebola treatment center in Sierra Leone, the EHR leverages a Java-based web application called OpenMRS that enables the design of a customized medical records system with no programming.

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OpenMRS Announces 2017 Google Summer of Code students

Congratulations to the 15 students selected by OpenMRS to participate in Google Summer of Code™ this year! A total of nearly 1,400 students were selected to participate with 201 different open-source projects. As the organization administrators for the program, we are thrilled to announce our 11th year of participation yet in the annual event graciously sponsored by Google. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed participating in this great program in the last 10 years and are even more excited about the students, projects and mentors that are participating this year. Coding for OpenMRS is a great way for university students to practice coding skills and at the same time help benefit people in developing countries who are on the front lines of the battle against HIV/AIDS, TB, Malaria, and other public health challenges. Read More »

OpenMRS Community Announces Malawi will be the Host Country for OMRS17

OpenMRS Global Events Manager Christine Gichuki announced yesterday that Malawi has been chosen as the host country for the OpenMRS 2017 implemeters meeting (OMRS17). This is a major milestone for the OpenMRS project. OMRS16 was hosted by the government of Uganda last year. The conference was a major success as I decribed in a presentation at the recent OSEHRA 2017 meeting in Bethesda, Maryland. This will be the second OMRS meeting that is hosted the by a national goverment. The incredibly successful meeting in Uganda is described in this article.

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OpenMRS Releases 2016 Annual Report - Shows Explosive Growth of Open Source EHR

Press Release | OpenMRS | March 23, 2017

OpenMRS®, a free and open source health IT software platform built by volunteers around the world, is marking the start of its second decade by releasing its second annual report, for 2016. The document highlights the achievements of the open source community in the past year, improvements to the OpenMRS software, and lays out the strategic goals for 2017. For over 10 years, people around the world have leveraged OpenMRS to improve health status and achieve health equity through the use of health information technology. OpenMRS is a global leader in open technologies and open standards in healthcare...

Overlooked Disease Killing Tens of Thousands in the Tropics

Researchers have raised the alarm about an overlooked bacterial disease that they say killed 89,000 people in 79 countries in 2015. In a paper published in Nature Microbiology last week (11 January), researchers say that melioidosis is likely to be present in most of the tropics, including 34 countries where it has never been reported. 

Peer into the Post-Apocalyptic Future of Antimicrobial Resistance

Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker | Wired | March 18, 2017

Aout 4 million years ago, a cave was forming in the Delaware Basin of what is now Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. From that time on, Lechuguilla Cave remained untouched by humans or animals until its discovery in 1986—an isolated, pristine primeval ecosystem. When the bacteria found on the walls of Lechuguilla were analyzed, many of the microbes were determined not only to have resistance to natural antibiotics like penicillin, but also to synthetic antibiotics that did not exist on earth until the second half of the twentieth century...

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Peer into the Post-Apocalyptic Future of Antimicrobial Resistance

Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker | Wired | March 18, 2017

Aout 4 million years ago, a cave was forming in the Delaware Basin of what is now Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. From that time on, Lechuguilla Cave remained untouched by humans or animals until its discovery in 1986—an isolated, pristine primeval ecosystem. When the bacteria found on the walls of Lechuguilla were analyzed, many of the microbes were determined not only to have resistance to natural antibiotics like penicillin, but also to synthetic antibiotics that did not exist on earth until the second half of the twentieth century...

Read More »