Experts Call for Global Research Fund for Antibiotics, Ebola and Other Neglected Diseases

Thursday, May 14, 2015

The Ebola outbreak in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone brought it home. For some deadly diseases, there are no drug treatments. Even doctors who were infected in west Africa and shipped back to the wealthy USA or Europe were given experimental medicines, because that is all there is.

This situation has been known and deplored by medicines campaigners for many years. Ebola has always been a disease of the poor in Africa. Other such diseases that kill and harm many more thousands also have no treatments or the drugs that exist are inadequate. They include sleeping sickness, leishmaniasis, elephantiasis and river blindness. Malaria, too, is neglected, because the drugs to treat it invariably run out of potency within a number of years.

But it is not just a developing world issue. This affects everybody. Antibiotics are losing their power in the face of microbial resistance. Doomsday scenarios are now regularly painted. We could reach a situation where transplants are not possible and even general surgery is potentially lethal because of the dangers of infection.

So a group of experts is now calling for a global fund to be established, worth at least $10 billion, to pay for the research and development of such drugs. The market has failed to produce what the world needs. Ahead of the World Health Assembly which opens in Geneva on Monday, they are putting the case for special measures in a paper in the open-access journal PLoS Medicine.

The authors include campaigners Bernard Pe´coul of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative in Geneva and Manica Balasegaram of Médecins Sans Frontières’ access campaign, but also Christian Bre´chot from the Institut Pasteur, Yves Le´vy of INSERM in Paris, Jeremy Farrar who heads the Wellcome Trust and David Heymann of the Centre of Global Health Security at Chatham House in London. Other signatories are leading lights in China, India, South Africa, Norway and the USA. This is Pe´coul:

Source: The Guardian (link opens in a new window)

Categories
Education, Health Care
Tags
infectious diseases, research