Bad bugs, no drugs

Here’s a scary story:

A few years back, farmers in central China came down with a strange sickness that included vomiting, diarrhea and high fevers.

Dean Courtney Fletcher, Pharm.D., and other College of Pharmacy researchers are hard at work in the effort to find new drugs for new and emerging diseases.

Their organs rapidly failed. About a third of those farmers died.

The illness spread to six other regions of China, proving fatal in 12 percent of cases. Researchers eventually discovered that the sickness — which they named Severe Fever — was a previously unknown virus that was transmitted by ticks.

Another scary story

In 2008, about 170,000 people in the United States died from new, emerging and neglected infectious diseases such as H1N1 influenza virus, SARS and H5N1 avian influenza virus.

Yet the Food and Drug Administration approved no new antibacterial drugs in 2008 and since 1998 has approved only 12 new antibacterial drugs.

Read a story from the latest edition of UNMC Connect about how researchers in the College of Pharmacy work to discover new drugs and new drug delivery systems to fight these bad bugs.