Canada’s universal health care system does not include universal coverage of prescription drugs. We sought to estimate the effects of adding universal public coverage of an essential medicines list to existing public drug plans in Canada.

Original Source

Malaria parasites degrade substantial quantities of hemoglobin to release heme within a specialized digestive vacuole. Most of this heme is sequestered in an inert crystal. However, the concentration of bioavailable, labile heme in the parasite’s cytosol was unknown. We developed a biosensor to provide the first quantitative insights into labile heme concentrations in malaria parasites. We find that ∼1.6 µM labile cytosolic heme is maintained, including during a period coincident with intense hemoglobin degradation.

South Africa has a large burden of rifampicin-resistant tuberculosis (RR-TB), with 18,734 patients diagnosed in 2014. The number of diagnosed patients has increased substantially with the introduction of the Xpert MTB/RIF test, used for tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis for all patients with presumptive TB. Routine aggregate data suggest a large treatment gap (pre-treatment loss to follow-up) between the numbers of patients with laboratory-confirmed RR-TB and those reported to have started second-line treatment.