April 7th, 2011, will be the 11th annual World Health Day. This year the World Health Organization (WHO) is encouraging organizations to host events focusing on the increasing threat of antimicrobial resistance. The improper use of medicines can create conditions where viruses, bacteria and parasites develop resistance to the drugs used to treat them.
Drug resistance is becoming more severe and many infections are no longer easily cured, leading to prolonged and expensive treatment and greater risk of death, warns the WHO on World Health Day. Under the theme “Combat Drug Resistance”, WHO calls for urgent and concerted action by governments, health professionals, industry and civil society and patients to slow down the spread of drug resistance, limit its impact today and preserve medical advances for future generations.
These “superbugs” can have a devastating effect: according to the WHO, there are 150,000 deaths a year from multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. There are concerns that the increased use of retroviral medicines to treat HIV may lead to the development of similarly resistant strains of that virus. On April 11th, the WHO will release a six-point policy package and encourage politicians, healthcare providers and individuals around the world to adopt these policies in order to help curtail the spread of drug-resistant diseases. In Canada, a number of organizations, including the National Collaborating Centre for Infectious Diseases and the Public Health Agency of Canada, had previously partnered together to mark November 18, 2010 as Antibiotics Awareness Day. The partnership is now working to increase awareness of World Health Day.
Among the factors cited by the WHO for the rise of these resistant strains are insufficient monitoring and surveillance and inadequate research efforts. which received Royal Assent in December of 2010, but has not yet come into force. The Act requires “custodians” of medical records to obtain informed consent from individuals regarding the uses that will be made of their information and to take steps to protect the confidentiality of information under their control. A recent blog post by David Fraser suggests that in certain contexts, there may be concurrent jurisdiction between the PHIA and the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, requiring researchers to satisfy the demands of both laws.
These “superbugs” can have a devastating effect: according to the WHO, there are 150,000 deaths a year from multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. There are concerns that the increased use of retroviral medicines to treat HIV may lead to the development of similarly resistant strains of that virus. On April 11th, the WHO will release a six-point policy package and encourage politicians, healthcare providers and individuals around the world to adopt these policies in order to help curtail the spread of drug-resistant diseases. In Canada, a number of organizations, including the National Collaborating Centre for Infectious Diseases and the Public Health Agency of Canada, had previously partnered together to mark November 18, 2010 as Antibiotics Awareness Day. The partnership is now working to increase awareness of World Health Day.
Among the factors cited by the WHO for the rise of these resistant strains are insufficient monitoring and surveillance and inadequate research efforts. which received Royal Assent in December of 2010, but has not yet come into force. The Act requires “custodians” of medical records to obtain informed consent from individuals regarding the uses that will be made of their information and to take steps to protect the confidentiality of information under their control. A recent blog post by David Fraser suggests that in certain contexts, there may be concurrent jurisdiction between the PHIA and the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, requiring researchers to satisfy the demands of both laws.
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