Europe failing to respond to global TB threat
Europe failing to respond to global TB threat
MSF report reveals insufficient and badly designed funding for research
Brussels – 12 November 2008 – New analysis from international medical humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) shows how the European Commission is failing to pay its fair share towards discovering and developing new tuberculosis (TB) vaccines, diagnostics and treatments.
MSF is calling on the European Commission to increase its funding five fold into research for medical tools to fight TB in the face of a global epidemic that claims 1.7 million lives a year.
“Because the tests and drugs we use today aren’t anything like effective enough, MSF teams responding to the epidemic in Africa and Asia are faced with an almost impossible task,” said Dr. Tido von Schoen-Angerer, Director of MSF's Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines. “We desperately need new vaccines, drugs and diagnostics for TB. This will only happen with more research.”
This is ever more urgent given TB’s rapid spread among people living with HIV and the rise of drug-resistant strains of the disease which do not respond to many of the commonly used treatments.
On a global scale, around 1.45 billion euros needs to be spent on TB research and development (R&D). MSF estimates that the European Union’s (EU) fair contribution would be 409 million euros a year. But MSF’s report shows that the European Commission spent a mere 18.7 million euros on TB R&D in 2007.
“Europe’s responsibility here is clear,” said Dr. von Schoen-Angerer. “Countries right on Europe’s doorstep – and even within the European Union – are struggling against resistant strains of the disease. But the research budgets remain pitifully low. Tuberculosis is knocking loudly on the door, but the European Commission is playing deaf.”
And member states are not making up the shortfall. An earlier MSF analysis found that Germany, the EU’s largest economy, was only contributing 7.5 million euros in 2007. “The European Commission cannot pass the buck on to the member states and vice versa”, said Dr. von Schoen-Angerer.
MSF’s analysis also shows how the European Commission (EC) funding is badly tailored to suit the needs of developers of vaccines, drugs and tests. The EC largely ignores new alternatives to the traditional patent-based research model, such as non-profit partnerships and prize funds. By eliminating the need for high drug prices to recover research and development costs, these innovative approaches could overcome the neglect of research into diseases that do not attract sufficient investment from industry, such as tuberculosis.
While it focuses on TB, MSF’s analysis also looked at other diseases: in 2007, only 17.1 million euros were spent on research and development for malaria. Not a single euro went into research for other neglected tropical diseases such as Leishmaniasis or Chagas, although these affect millions of people in developing countries.
MSF treats almost 30,000 people with tuberculosis in 39 countries worldwide.
NOTE TO EDITORS:
The report entitled “Cough up for TB! - The Underfunding of Research for Tuberculosis and Other Neglected Diseases by the European Commission” is being released in the run-up to a EC conference on poverty-related diseases in Brussels on 13 and 14 November 2008.
<media 2190 - cw_details>To download the report click here</media>
For more information, please contact:
Stephan Grosse Rueschkamp, Médecins Sans Frontières, +41 79 293 02 70
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Getting life-saving malaria care to many more patients
Johannesburg/Brussels - 30th September 2008 – In a new report launched today, the international medical organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said many more lives can be saved if newer effective strategies to tackle malaria are more widely implemented. The report titled “Full Prescription; better malaria treatment for more people, MSF’s experience” describes the organisation’s work in Sierra Leone, Chad and Mali, and shows that unnecessary illnesses and deaths can be avoided with simple, affordable treatment and diagnostic tools available today.
“Although still insufficient, increased funding is available for malaria ,” says Meinie Nicolai, General Director of MSF in Brussels. “Newer and more effective drugs have started to arrive on the shelves, rapid tests exist that can confirm the diagnosis in fifteen minutes. But many efforts are failing at the last hurdle and scores of sick people, mainly children, still do not get the treatment they need.”
In large parts of sub-Saharan Africa, people do not go to health structures because they are too expensive and too far away. In Sierra Leone, for example, only 12% of children suspected of having malaria received efficient treatment in the health services . MSF’s experience and research show that the fees patients are requested to pay are a huge deterrent to seeking care in most of the poor settings where MSF works.
A second barrier to providing malaria care effectively is geographical. Some rural communities are very remote from health structures, or isolated by water during the rainy season. Strategies involving malaria village workers have proved to be highly efficient in reaching and treating malaria patients where they live. By combining free care at health centre level and in the communities that were geographically isolated, MSF’s project in Mali succeeded in tripling the number of malaria cases detected and treated over a year’s time.
This has been possible without jeopardising the quality of care through user-friendly rapid tests, which allow lay-people with basic training to confirm if the patient’s fever is indeed caused by malaria. When cases are identified, the malaria village worker dispenses drugs to the patient or the caretaker free of charge.
“Malaria village workers are not the silver bullet,” explains Christine Jamet, Head of Mission for MSF in Chad. “But they allow to efficiently bridge the gap where health structures are not accessible. They should not exempt the authorities from extending access to care, especially as people who test negative for malaria must be treated for whatever causes their fever and complex cases need to be referred to a health structure. To ensure appropriate medical treatment, malaria cases should be systematically confirmed by using a test.”
At the moment, the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends to treat all children with fever, in highly endemic regions, with anti-malarial drugs. But in a Sierra Leone for example, a high-transmission area, systematic use of rapid tests in our project in Bo showed that 30 to 40 % of the suspected cases under five are actually negative.. Not using the tests - as recommended by WHO - means that many will receive treatment for the wrong disease and no further examination will be performed to check what actually causes the fever.
