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NEW REPORT: The World Needs Better Incentives to Combat Suberbugs
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The World Needs Better Incentives to Combat Suberbugs
By Arielle Kane and Dr. Michael Mandel
Germs resistant to treatments kill roughly 35,000 Americans per year. Infections caused by drug-resistant bacteria, viruses, and fungi are on the rise, and without changes in policy, could kill 12 million people annually worldwide by 2050. Drug-resistant infections could reduce global GDP by 2%-3.5% by 2050, according to the World Bank.
The overuse of antibiotics and poor infection control during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic may have exacerbated antimicrobial resistance (AMR). AMR occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites evolve to no longer respond to treatments or when new pathogens that resist treatment emerge. Often referred to as “superbugs,” they pose the risk of severe illness or death.
If science doesn’t stay ahead of AMR, health care will slide backwards to the days when diseases now considered treatable — pneumonia and skin staph aureus infections — killed thousands of people each year. Yet today we’re seeing the spread of deadly strains of bacteria that can cause blood infections, pneumonia, and sepsis. That’s why the World Health Organization says that antimicrobial resistance is one of the top 10 global public health challenges threatening the practice of modern medicine.
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Want to learn more about the threats superbugs pose to global health?
Join us on Wednesday, September 21 at 2:00 p.m. ET to hear from leading experts about the health and economic costs of the crisis, and the policy actions needed now.
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New from the Experts
Jeremiah Johnson, Policy Director for the Center of New Liberalism: The Case for Abolishing the National Environmental Policy Act
⮕ LiberalCurrents
Paul Weinstein, PPI's Senior Fellow: U.S. School Closures Leave Students Behind
⮕ Forbes
Arielle Kane, PPI's Director of Healthcare: Hospitals charge wildly different for same operations. New rules won't fix that
⮕ The Columbus Dispatch
Where Walmart, Amazon and Target are spending billions in a slowing economy ft. Dr. Michael Mandel, PPI's Vice President and Chief Economist
⮕ CNBC
S. Korea warned heavy sanctions on Apple, Google might backfire ft. Dr. Michael Mandel, PPI's Vice President and Chief Economist
⮕ EconoTimes
Ed Gresser's Trade Fact of the Week: The Trade Adjustment Assistance Program Expired June 30
⮕ Trade Fact of the Week
Ed Gresser's Trade Fact of the Week: 1.4 million Americans have Pacific Island roots
⮕ Trade Fact of the Week
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The superbugs are coming — oh wait, they’re here.
By Krista Mahr and Daniel Payne
WASHINGTON NEEDS TO GET SERIOUS ABOUT SUPERBUGS — Covid-19 has made a lot of things about public health worse, and antimicrobial resistance is no exception. In 2019, more than a million people worldwide died from drug-resistant infections, according to The Lancet, and that was before the pandemic. In 2020, drug-resistant hospital-onset infections spiked 15 percent in the U.S. alone, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates.
Despite tens of thousands of Americans dying each year from drug-resistant infections, this is not an issue that gets a lot of time in the Beltway health-policy spotlight.
But last week, federal health officials, health advocates, pharma start-ups and investors met for two days at the World Antimicrobial Resistance Congress in some chilly conference rooms at the National Harbor in Maryland.
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Joe Manchin’s right: We need permitting reform
By Jeremiah Johnson, Policy Director for the Center for New Liberalism
In November 2016, Seattle voters approved a plan to expand the city’s light rail transit system. Almost six years later, the project still hasn’t properly begun. Instead, in January 2022 the city’s Sound Transit released a draft of their required Environmental Impact Statement, which ran more than 8,000 pages long. The final version of this EIS won’t be ready until 2023, at which point the project will already have spent hundreds of millions of dollars before a single shovel hits the ground. Current timelines, which might be delayed, call for services on the new lines to be open by 2039.
If a 23-year timeline from voter approval to project completion seems ridiculous to you, you’re not alone. America has a huge problem with not being able to build anything cheaply or quickly. One of the key obstacles is our environmental permitting process. The National Environmental Policy Act is one of America’s foundational environmental laws, but it now requires incredibly long review processes that end up doing more harm than good.
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RADICALLY PRAGMATIC:
Can Big Tech Save Us from Algorithmic Bias?
On this episode of the Radically Pragmatic podcast, Dr. Kalinda Ukanwa sits down with Jordan Shapiro, PPI’s Data and Economic Policy Analyst, to discuss her paper entitled, “Breaking Up Big Tech Will Not Prevent Algorithmic Harm to Society.”
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THE NEOLIBERAL PODCAST:
Slouching Towards Utopia ft. Brad DeLong
The world is so much richer than it was 150 years ago that past generations might look at society today and declare it a utopia. But how did we get here, and are we really living in utopia? Economist Brad DeLong joins the podcast to discuss his new book, Slouching Towards Utopia.
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Don't Miss These PPI Reports
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