Uniting to combat neglected tropical diseases: public-private partnership

Today, 13 pharmaceutical companies, the U.S., U.K. and U.A.E governments, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank and other global health organisations announced a new, coordinated push to accelerate progress toward eliminating or controlling 10 neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) by the end of the decade.

Uniting efforts with NTD-endemic countries, partners pledged to bring a unique focus to defeating these diseases and to work together to improve the lives of the 1.4 billion people worldwide affected by NTDs, most of whom are among the world’s poorest.

• Additional media and other resources
• Endorse the London Declaration on NTDs

GSK malaria vaccine could save millions of lives

The following report published in The Guardian today provides encouraging global health news — GSK’s new vaccine against malaria has been shown to halve the risk of malaria.

Malaria vaccine could save millions of children’s lives

Millions of small children’s lives could be saved by a new vaccine that has been shown to halve the risk of malaria in the first large-scale trials across seven African countries.

The long-awaited results of the largest-ever malaria vaccine study, involving 15,460 babies and small children, show that it could massively reduce the impact of the much-feared killer disease. Malaria takes nearly 800,000 lives every year – most of them children under five. It damages many more.

The vaccine has been in development for two decades – the brainchild of scientists at the UK drug company GlaxoSmithKline, which has promised to sell it at no more than a fraction over cost-price, with the excess being ploughed back into further tropical disease research.

Milestone reached in Measles vaccination

The United Nations Foundation reported today that one billion children in more than 60 developing countries have been immunized against measles since 2001 — the start of the Measles Initiative.

In 1980, before widespread vaccination, measles caused an estimated 2.6 million deaths each year. With accelerated immunization activities spearheaded by governments and the Measles Initiative, global measles mortality has decreased by an impressive 78 percent worldwide from 733,000 deaths in 2000 to 164,000 in 2008. Reductions in measles-related deaths during that same time period accounts for nearly a quarter (24 percent) of the overall decrease in childhood mortality, representing significant progress toward Millennium Development Goal 4 (MDG4).

 

UN protects millions of children in DR Congo with anti-measles vaccination

Some 3.1 million children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have been vaccinated against measles in a United Nations-coordinated campaign to combat the disease outbreak which has claimed the lives of 1,145 children since the start of this year.

The measles epidemic affected a total of 115,600 children between January and June, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a press release issued yesterday, adding that the vaccination campaign was funded with $1.9 million.

The campaign, which kicked off on 10 May, was coordinated by the UN World Health Organization (WHO) in the provinces of Katanga, Kasai Occidental, Bas-Congo, Equateur and Orientale.  “The funding – equivalent to 61 cents per child – helped protect the health of millions of children,” said Fidèle Sarassoro, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for DRC.

Measles is a highly contagious viral disease, which mostly affects children. It is transmitted through droplets from the nose, mouth or throat of infected persons. Initial symptoms, which usually appear between eight to 12 days after infection, include high fever, a running nose, bloodshot eyes, and tiny white spots on the inside of the mouth. A rash then develops, starting on the face and upper neck and gradually spreading to the rest of the body.

In malnourished children and people with reduced immunity, the disease can cause serious complications, including blindness, encephalitis, severe diarrhoea, ear infection, pneumonia and even death.

Source – UN Daily News

Dengue – new site highlights disease information and research

Population growth, urbanization and rapid mass transportation have resulted in an explosive increase in dengue cases – from 1.2 million in 1998 to as many as 500 million annual cases today – and contributed to an ever growing number of countries and people at risk of infection. Dengue is now endemic in over 100 countries across the globe, and is the most prevalent mosquito-borne viral disease.

The Dengue Vaccine Initiative just launched a new site to provide a central resource for information about the disease, vaccines and other efforts.

Substantial progress towards finding a vaccine has been made in the last decade. Several vaccines are in various stages of advanced development, with clinical trials currently underway on five candidate vaccines. Trials in the most advanced stages are showing encouraging preliminary data.

Dengue is a major cause of morbidity and mortality and a leading cause of hospitalization of children in many countries in tropical and subtropical areas of the world. The greatest documented burden of dengue occurs in Asia and Latin America, but the disease is now appearing in previously unaffected areas. The cost of illness to society is considerable, from lost wages and decreased productivity to costs associated with seeking care and direct medical expenses. An estimated 60% of the economic strain caused by dengue is a result of indirect costs. The cost of dengue in the Western Hemisphere alone is estimated at $2.1 billion per year.

 

IFPMA launches NCD Framework for Action

IFPMA (International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations) recently released a NCD Framework for Action, highlighting specific areas of action including:  innovation, access and affordability, prevention and health education.  The document underscores the essential role of partnerships in addressing the challenge of non-communicable disease.

Read more about the NCD Framework for Action:

PharmaTimes – IFPMA pledges action on non-communicable diseases

IFPMA – Research-based pharmaceutical industry launches collaborative framework to tackle NCDs

UN releases 2011 report on MDGs

Today, the UN released The Millennium Development Goals Report 2011, highlighting progress and key areas for improvement as we get closer to the 2015 deadline.

Some of the areas of progress cited were:

• The number of deaths of children under the age of five declined from 12.4 million in 1990 to 8.1 million in 2009, which means nearly 12,000 fewer children die each day.
• Increased funding and intensive control efforts have cut deaths from malaria by 20 per cent worldwide – from nearly 985,000 in 2000 to 781,000 in 2009.
• New HIV infections have declined steadily. In 2009, some 2.6 million people were newly infected with HIV – a 21 per cent drop since 1997, when new infections peaked.
• The number of people receiving antiretroviral therapy for HIV or AIDS increased 13-fold from 2004 to 2009, thanks to increased funding and expanded programs.

Diabetes crisis worse than thought: 347 million adult sufferers

(From PharmaTimes)  A major international study has been published inThe Lancet which reveals the scale of global diabetes epidemic, with the disease becoming more common almost everywhere in the world.

The study, which was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Health Organisation, took worldwide data on diabetes since 1980 and found that the number of adults with the disease reached 347 million in 2008. This is more than double the number in 1980 and way up on a previous study in 2009 which put the number worldwide at 285 million.

The results, which revealed that high blood glucose and diabetes are responsible for over three million deaths worldwide each year, show that 70% of the rise was due to population growth and ageing, with the other 30% due to higher prevalence. The proportion of adults with diabetes rose to 9.8% of men and 9.2% of women in 2008, compared with 8.3% and 7.5% in 1980.

The study was co-led by Majid Ezzati from Imperial College London and Goodarz Danaei from the Harvard School of Public Health. Prof Ezzati noted that diabetes “is becoming more common almost everywhere in the world”, which is in contrast to blood pressure and cholesterol, which have both fallen in many regions. Dr Danaei added that “unless we develop better programmes for detecting people with elevated blood sugar and helping them to improve their diet and physical activity and control their weight, diabetes will inevitably continue to impose a major burden on health systems around the world.”

 2.7 million study participants

The study included blood sugar measurements from 2.7 million participants aged 25 or more across the world. It found that diabetes has taken off most dramatically in Pacific Island nations, which now have the highest diabetes levels in the world.

In the Marshall Islands, for example, a staggering one in three women and one in four men have diabetes. Glucose and diabetes were also particularly high in south Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, Central Asia, North Africa and the Middle East.

However, the rise in diabetes was relatively small in western Europe and highest in North America. Off the richer nations, diabetes and glucose levels were highest in the USA, Greenland, Malta, New Zealand and Spain, and lowest in the Netherlands, Austria and France.

Of the aforementioned 347 million people with diabetes, 138 million live in China and India and another 36 million in the USA and Russia. The region with the lowest glucose levels was sub-Saharan Africa, followed by east and southeast Asia.

Global Health Initiative: progress and future plans

The following is an interesting interview by PBS News Hour with the Executive Director of the U.S. Global Health Initiative.

Q&A: Head of the Global Health Initiative Talks Next Moves

BY TALEA MILLER

First announced in 2009, the initiative was envisioned as a comprehensive approach to health in the developing world that would integrate HIV/AIDS and other health services, and strengthen health systems.

Critics of the program say that it hasn’t moved quickly enough and that the funding — a proposed $63 billion over six years — isn’t enough to expand the global health mission.

The eight “plus” countries — Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nepal, and Rwanda — were chosen to serve as models for integrating health services, and better serving women and children, among other goals.

GHI Executive Director Lois Quam was at the International Conference on Global Health this week to provide an update and talked with the PBS NewsHour about what’s been accomplished and what’s ahead.

NewsHour: How would you assess the progress in the GHI focus countries one year in?

GHI Executive Director Lois Quam: GHI has taken hold in our plus countries. I see that in many ways, I see that in the energy of our teams, they own these GHI country strategies. We’ve seen a very significant level of collaboration and cooperation between all the government agencies…we see an increase in real results on the ground. We see that we are able to treat more people, save more lives and that we are able to put the building blocks in place so that countries can do a better job of caring for their own citizens.

This has enabled us to take the learnings from round one and go out to another group of roughly 20 countries in round two and we’ll be getting those plans in over the next couple weeks. Then we’ll go out to a further 30 countries in round three.

NewsHour: When you talk about being able to treat more people, and the lessons that you’ve learned this year, what are some examples of that?

Quam: In a place like Mali, for example, we discovered as we sat down and did our overall global health plan …that there were areas of duplication and certain areas of overlap that weren’t quite well-defined, so what we were able to do there is really kind of streamline our work and that frees up important new resources in other areas. So that specifically allowed us to improve the services we are providing for neglected tropical diseases, a huge problem in that region, and then expand the work that we are doing there.

In Ethiopia, we’re doing tremendous work working with PEPFAR and the existing programs on skilled health attendants that can provide services in rural areas, which is so important. Only 6 percent of women in Ethiopia give birth in a facility, and that leads to enormous loss of life and complications and such terrible hardship for their families. So those are just two of our many many examples. We are looking at interesting ways of changing how medical education works in Rwanda that would allow Rwanda to be more self-sufficient.

Our goal in GHI is to work with our partner countries so that they can take care of their own heath needs effectively over time by our providing leadership and support and helping them get a handle on the crises they have in place. But our objective is really to help them meet their own needs.

NewsHour: There has been some criticism of the pace of the GHI, that it’s not being implemented quickly enough, that there’s not enough money attached to it to really broaden this U.S. global health mandate. How do you respond to that?

Quam: First let me respond to the question around speed. We have been doing very significant work in these countries, which I don’t think is as visible in Washington as we’d like it to be and that’s why we are looking at doing more forums with leaders from the countries themselves. All the action in this field takes place in country…and that’s what you’re going to see, you’re going to see less of headquarters and more of the field and that will give people a more accurate sense of what is going on.

I think in addition with regard to money, this administration has supported global health very strongly. There was an intention to very significantly increase funding, the obvious challenges around the federal budget have made that more difficult to do than we thought it was when GHI was announced in 2009.

Despite that, the administration has been very, very strong in these areas, and so we’re very proud of that support and just last week the administration announced important new initiatives around making sure that women who are HIV positive bearing babies who are HIV negative, which is a huge accomplishment in Africa, one we know can be done because we’ve done it in this country.

We also announced an increase in funding as a part of the international coalition for vaccines for poor children around the world. But what we know we need to do is we need to create the new money that we need to solve these challenges by improving the efficiency and effectiveness always of what we do, because we know that despite the very strong support for global health in the public and in the Congress, that the country faces real budget challenges and we are going to respond to those.

NewsHour: Earlier this year we saw some very promising research showing that ARVs could work as prevention for HIV transmission. On the ground, implementing this would mean greatly expanding the pool of patients that would need these medications, have GHI and PEPFAR been talking about implementing this?

Quam: Oh of course and that is an example of the U.S. government’s leadership, the work that NIH did under Tony Fauci. It’s a breakthrough finding because what we’ve been struggling to find in HIV is better ways of preventing the spread of the epidemic, that’s the most essential thing. This research gives us a new window into that, I take that very very seriously and that is really important.

Now we, with the international community as a whole, need to really discuss what the implications of that research is on our global strategy for HIV and AIDS. That process began in earnest last week at the United Nations.

NewsHour: At this point has there been any specific discussion about allocation of resources for funding for this type of expansion?

Quam: We are in the process of looking at that research and understanding what the implications are on our existing efforts. The U.S. global health programs play a very major role in prevention already and as we with the international community determine what we are going to do there we will be ready to say more about that.

NewsHour: When can we expect to learn which countries are in round two of the GHI?

Quam: We’ll be announcing that later this summer. They get the benefit of everything the plus countries learned and one of the things that we’ve found is most important is the sharing between the plus countries and the next round of countries, that’s where a lot of the deep learning comes.

World No Tobacco Day

On 31st May each year WHO celebrates World No Tobacco Day, highlighting the health risks associated with tobacco use and advocating for effective policies to reduce consumption. Tobacco use is the second cause of death globally (after hypertension) and is currently responsible for killing one in 10 adults worldwide.

According to the WHO, nearly 6 million people will die this year from tobacco use.

The World Health Assembly created World No Tobacco Day in 1987 to draw global attention to the tobacco epidemic and its lethal effects. It provides an opportunity to highlight specific tobacco control messages and to promote adherence to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Tobacco use is the number one preventable epidemic that the health community faces.

World No Tobacco Day info.