April 2019

The United States faces a converging public health crisis as the nation’s opioid epidemic fuels growing rates of certain infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, heart infections, and skin and soft tissue infections. Infectious disease and substance use disorder professionals must work together to stem the mounting public health threat, according to a new commentary in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. The article was co-authored by officials from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, and the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.

A drug approved to treat a severe form of asthma dramatically improved the health of people with rare chronic immune disorders called hypereosinophilic syndromes (HES) in whom other treatments were ineffective or intolerable. This finding comes from a small clinical trial led by scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, and conducted through a partnership with the global biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. The results were published online today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Acute flaccid myelitis (AFM) presents significant challenges not only to patients but also to researchers, and efforts must be accelerated to learn more about the condition, experts from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, write in a new perspective published in mBio.

General, non-pharmacovigilance fees payable to EMA by applicants and marketing-authorisation holders are increasing by 1.7% on 1 April 2019. Full details of the new fee levels are available in Commission Regulation (EU) No 2019/480 amending Council Regulation (EC) No 297/95 , its implementing rules and the corresponding explanatory note on fees , published on 1 April 2019.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have the potential to fundamentally transform the delivery of health care. As technology and science advance, we can expect to see earlier disease detection, more accurate diagnosis, more targeted therapies and significant improvements in personalized medicine.