HEALTH-GLOBAL: MSF Steps in to Fund “Neglected Diseases”

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

MEXICO CITY, Dec. 30, Dec 30 1999 (IPS) - An international health organisation has reconfirmed its commitment to help the sick and the dying in the Third World by pledging to create a special fund to fight forgotten killer diseases.

Medecins Sans Frontiers (MSF), the Europe-based organisation which won the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize, said this month that it would spend its prize money of nearly one million dollars on a neglected disease fund to counter the rapid spread of diseases in developing countries, which are often overlooked by big pharmaceutical companies.

MSF cited AIDS, sleeping sickness and tuberculosis, with a special focus on malaria, which kills close to a million people each year.

Many of the old anti-malarial drugs are no longer in production. And people are dying because they are not considered to be a lucrative market, said Bernard Pecoul, MSF’s project director, after the group was awarded its prize in Oslo, Norway.

The international team of doctors and nurses who work for MSF in various countries ranging from Africa to Asia have also pointed to another reason why such efforts are critical: in the last few years they have witnessed a new form of health crisis.

MSF’s pledge comes in the wake of a campaign it launched this year that was critical of the shift in research and development of drugs by the pharmaceutical industry.

At that time, it stated that prevailing research had a strong bias toward “lifestyle” diseases like obesity and impotence, and the industry’s priorities have focused on the wealthiest consumers to provide high returns to stockholders.

Studies conducted by MSF, in fact, offered a vivid picture of this disparity. Of 1,233 new drugs that came on the market between 1975 and 1997, only 11 were for tropical diseases.

According to Pecoul, research into diseases like malaria has virtually halted. “We see the implications of this trend in the 80 countries where we work; we are forced to watch people die because we are using ineffective treatments that were developed more than 50 years ago,” he said.

MSF is not alone in trying to draw global attention to the effort to combat malaria.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has also focused on this issue, appealing to the international community for money to deal with forgotten humanitarian emergencies.

In her address to mark Global Humanitarian Day on Nov. 23, WHO Director-General Gro Harlem Brundtland made particular reference to this need.

The lack of funds, she declared, would only increase the unacceptable load many in the Third World would have to carry in terms of diseases like malaria.

According to Brundtland, the WHO’s efforts to help sick people in the developing world gain access to health services is woefully underfunded.

Of the 33.6 million dollars requested by WHO for humanitarian health programmes during 1999, only 39.4 percent has been provided so far, she observed.

In Africa, for instance, the WHO estimates that two billion dollars is needed to fight malaria over the next 10 years.

The concern over malaria can be better understood in light of recent media reports that the disease is spreading in South America, Africa and Asia.

The situation is very bad, with high infection rates and, even worse, increased resistance to drugs, said Dr. Robert Ridley of the WHO.

The problem has also been aggravated by global warming, which creates a climate conducive to mosquitoes breeding and spreading the disease.

The current turn for the worse in two countries – Brazil and South Africa – illustrates Ridley’s observations.

In Brazil, for instance, health authorities have sounded a new alarm following studies that the number of people in Amazonas state who had succumbed to malaria had doubled.

Researchers in this South American nation have attributed this troubling development to the lack of proper medical facilities, inadequate resources to educate local residents and the inability of public authorities to destroy mosquito breeding grounds.

South Africa, on the other hand, finds itself up against mosquitoes that have become drug-resistant.

As a result, say health authorities, malaria has hit its highest level since record-keeping began almost three decades ago.

There were 8,229 cases of malaria recorded between July and October this year, an increase of 180 percent over the same period last year, when fewer than 3,000 cases were detected.

According to the WHO, of the 500 million people who suffer from acute malaria each year, the majority of victims are children. By itself or in tandem with other diseases, malaria kills a child every 30 seconds.

What troubles the WHO most is that these deaths are unnecessary. This year, close to 700,000 children are expected to die from malaria.

The cheapest malaria drug available on the market, chloroquine, is rapidly losing its effectiveness in almost all endemic areas. And health activists do not expect this scenario to improve, given how long it has been in circulation – 52 years.

According to James Orbinski, president of MSF, this picture is sufficient reason to look for remedies elsewhere, and stop relying on the drug industry. Leaving a solution in the hands of the private sector and market forces means the situation only will get worse, he added.

MSF says that what is most needed now is for wealthy countries, including members of the European Union, the United States and international donors like the World Bank, to step forward and fund drug development for these killer diseases.