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

Need to fix Food Aid to Tackle the Crisis of Childhood Malnutrition

Symposium on malnutrition brings hundreds of international experts to Columbia University Medical Center

New York, NY, September 11, 2008—Hundreds of international food aid and nutrition experts, representatives from donor institutions and aid organizations, and political leaders gathered in New York today to try to better tackle the scourge of global childhood malnutrition—a neglected crisis that contributes to the unnecessary deaths of 3.5 to five million children under five every year and leaves millions more with life-long disabilities.

The two-day symposium, titled "Starved for Attention: The Neglected Crisis of Childhood Malnutrition," is being hosted by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and Columbia University's Institute of Human Nutrition (IHN). Participants will examine why, despite domestic and international efforts, including billions of dollars in donated food aid every year, current nutrition programs do not adequately target childhood malnutrition. They will discuss ways to overcome barriers to improving diet quality and nutrition programming, particularly in malnutrition hotspots such as Southeast Asia, the Sahel and Horn of Africa.

"It is unacceptable that current food aid is not providing adequate, nutrient-rich food for the most vulnerable children,” said Dr. Susan Shepherd, nutrition advisor for MSF's Access to Essential Medicines Campaign. "It is a double standard that we send food aid to children in low-income countries that we would never feed to our own children. If we are serious about preventing the deaths, illnesses, and disabilities caused by childhood malnutrition, it's time we fix a broken food aid system. Making food aid more effective will mean changing what we provide."

For infants and young children, good nutrition depends on breast feeding and nutrient-rich complementary food. It is an issue of diet quality—nutrients and energy density—as much as quantity. But for poor families living in regions devastated by malnutrition, attaining nutrient-rich foods on a daily basis, particularly animal-source foods, is not possible. Yet at the international policy level, nutrition programs have not paid sufficient attention to addressing deficits in diet quality for infants and young children.

Current food aid for children consists largely of corn or wheat/soy-blended porridge, the ingredients of which can inhibit absorption of essential minerals, such as zinc, which are vital to childhood development and survival. These enriched flours also have no animal-source content, which is important for rapidly developing children. The milk component of fortified flours in U.S. overseas food aid targeted at young children was actually eliminated in the late 1980s for economic reasons.

"As we saw with HIV/AIDS, only when assistance is driven by desperate needs and not by economic interests do we mobilize sufficient resources to even begin to address a crisis of this magnitude,” said Stephen Lewis, co-director of AIDS Free World, and keynote speaker for the first day of the symposium.

Arguably the most important innovation in recent years has been an outpatient strategy based on milk-based, nutrient fortified, energy dense therapeutic foods to treat severely malnourished children in the most resource-limited settings. While strategies need to be adapted to local contexts in places where infrastructure and resources are limited, a strategy this simple, affordable, and direct can reach children in areas where malnutrition is chronically at crisis levels.

“There is no one solution to overcoming malnutrition, but there must be the political will and commitment to act," said Dr. Richard Deckelbaum, director of Columbia University's Institute of Human Nutrition. "We have to ask ourselves: what is the cost of doing nothing?"