Respiratory Infections News

Currently, the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin vaccine from 1921 is the only available vaccine for tuberculosis, according to a press release from the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases.

The FDA’s Antimicrobial Drugs Advisory Committee voted Thursday to support the approval of Paxlovid for the treatment of mild-to-moderate COVID-19 in adults at high risk for severe disease, hospitalization or death.

A decades-long study that enrolled participants in the 1940s found that contracting a lower respiratory tract infection in early childhood was associated with a higher risk for premature death from respiratory disease in adulthood.

The FDA said children aged 6 months to 4 years who completed a three-dose series of Pfizer-BioNTech’s monovalent COVID-19 vaccine can now receive the company’s bivalent booster under an expanded emergency use authorization.

Shorter primary care visits were associated with an increased likelihood of inappropriate antibiotic prescribing and coprescribing opioids and benzodiazepines, a recent study found.

Outpatient antibiotic prescribing fell more than 25% in 2020 compared with earlier years across all ages, but researchers found most of the prescribing was among adults, according to a study published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases.

An analysis of COVID-19 outcomes among people being treated for HIV or taking PrEP for HIV prevention found that the HIV medication tenofovir was associated with a lower rate of clinical events, suggesting a protective effect.

Around one-quarter of surveyed parents reported not adhering to a public health measures against COVID-19.

In the early months of 2020, amid a rapidly worsening pandemic, the U.S. government declared public health and national emergencies to help the country respond to COVID-19.

Drugs designed to treat heartburn may also help with tuberculosis by accelerating the treatment process, according to study results published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.