India launches project to reduce transport emissions

According to the UN Daily News, India has launched a new United Nations-backed project to reduce emissions and develop a low-carbon transport system.

While India’s per capita emissions are below the global average, they have the world’s second largest population – ranking the country as the world’s fourth largest greenhouse gas emitter.

In 2007, around 13 per cent of its emissions came from the transport sector.  That is expected to rise due to population growth, a rapid growth in the number of privately-owned vehicles and the switch from rail to road transport in the freight and passenger sectors.

The project is part of a National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) and involves designing low-carbon transport plans for major Indian cities.

Polio outbreak in Congo kills nearly 100

Polio has killed nearly 100 people, mainly young adults, in the Republic of Congo and paralyzed more than twice as many in the past six weeks, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) and a report from Reuters.

The crippling viral disease normally strikes children under five years of age, making the acute, fast-spreading outbreak unusual, the U.N. agency said.

“Most of the cases have involved young adults aged between 15 and 29. This illustrates that populations are at risk because they have not been exposed to a full immunization,” it said.

184 cases of acute flaccid paralysis and 85 deaths have been reported from the site of the acute poliomyelitis outbreak centred in Pointe Noire, Republic of Congo.  The mortality rate is higher than normal for the disease, which attacks the nervous system.

The virus comes from a strain from India, one of four remaining endemic countries — where the virus survives and its spread has never been interrupted — along with Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan.

A first wave of mass polio vaccination campaigns, targeting 3 million people of all ages, is set to begin on Friday in Congo and parts of Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The WHO, UNICEF, Rotary International and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been working together since 1988 to eradicate polio, which infected at least 350,000 people in 125 endemic countries each year at the time.

Polio in retreat – a feature in Scientific American

An interesting article from Scientific American on global efforts to eradicate polio, and recent indicators of significant progress in regions of India where the virus used to be prevalent.

Polio in Retreat: New Cases Nearly Eliminated Where Virus Once Flourished

New cases in key Indian states are hovering near zero—unprecedented, historic lows—suggesting that a long-time goal of eliminating the virus is within reach in parts of world where it has long been considered intractable

The world’s largest, most intractable source of polio may be on the brink of elimination. In India the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have produced more polio cases this decade—nearly 5,000—than any other location worldwide that has an active immunization campaign. Nigeria saw a handful more cases than the two Indian states because it effectively ceased immunizing in 2003 for a time due to false fears of the vaccine.

Now, even at the peak of polio season, new cases in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and indeed all of India hover near zero—unprecedented, historic lows. In the past decade the peak months of August and September have seen an average of roughly 140 people, usually children, stricken by poliomyelitis, which attacks motor neurons in the nervous system and can cause paralysis. But for the past four weeks running, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have hung zeros on the polio scoreboard, according to reports published as recently as October 28 by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.

Data source: AFP Surveillance Bulletin—India Report for week 41, ending 16 October 2010 (pdf)

Members of the Initiative, a public-private partnership among agencies including the World Health Organization, U.S. Centers for Disease Control, UNICEF and Rotary International, are leery of drawing attention to the trend because it could change. “[W]e are cautious,” says Sona Bari, communications officer for polio at WHO. The CDC’s Steve Wassilak adds, “I would rather celebrate after the fact than before,” although “we can be allowed to think that we are close.”

Polio was supposed to be eradicated worldwide by 2000, per a goal set by the World Health Assembly in 1988. In fact, polio cases have been reduced by 99 percent globally from about 350,000 in 1988; sustained transmission of the virus has been eliminated from all but a handful of countries.

Read the rest of the article online at www.scientificamerican.com.

Burden of NCDs in India – estimated USD 237 billion in lost national income (2006-15)

The Cameron Institute – a not-for-profit, public policy think tank — recently released an analysis of the economic impact of non-communicable diseases in India.

As of 2005, India experienced the “highest loss in potentially productive years of life” worldwide, according to an article published in The Lancet.The projected cumulative loss of national income for India due to non-communicable disease mortality for 2006-2015 will be USD237 billion. By 2030, this productivity loss was expected to double to 17.9 million years lost – almost 1,000% greater than the corresponding loss in the United States, which has a population a third the size of India’s.

Download and read the entire report.

India’s PM wants country to be world leader in IP

According to an article in the Economic Times, India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently made a forceful plea for fostering an environment that promoted scientific advancement in the country to help it become a “world leader” in creating intellectual property.

“Innovation and knowledge will be the key-factors in our progress in the 21st century,” said the Prime Minister.  ”We must, therefore, foster an environment that promotes and nurtures scientific achievement and makes us a world leader in creating intellectual property.”

Singh also said that scientific and technological prowess was key to the country’s development, noting that ”scientific development is an integral part of the journey towards inclusive, balanced and sustainable growth.”

Access to medicines in India: feedback from a gov’t consultation on compulsory licensing

India’s Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion (managed by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry) recently released a Discussion Paper on Compulsory Licensing and invited feedback from civil society groups, industry, academia and other stakeholders to guide their formulation of a compulsory licensing policy.

The Discussion Paper expressed concern regarding the availability of new products and technologies in India, including medicines and other pharmaceutical products, and seeks to explore whether compulsory licensing could be a viable solution.

Many of the submitted comments, including those of foreign business lobbies, warned that a proposal to allow government-owned or private companies to manufacture products and technologies patented by other companies, to ensure they are not in scarce supply, could discourage overseas investment in India.

Of particular interest was a submission by the Organization of Pharmaceutical Producers of India, which noted that:

Even a prima facie analysis of the situation in India would make it apparent that patents are not the primary cause for poor access to medicines in India.  Sales of patented products account for much less than 1% of the Indian Pharmaceutical market.

Thus, compulsory licensing of patented medicines can have no meaningful impact on improving access to medicines for the vast majority of the Indian population who lack the financial capability to pay for even generic, off-patent, medicines that comprise even more than 99% or so of the Indian Pharmaceutical market.

Over the past several years, the experience in most middle and low-income countries has been that private-public partnerships and affordable publicly supported health insurance do much more to improve access to medicines.

We do not believe that compulsory licensing of patented inventions is a sustainable or viable course of action to address India’s healthcare challenges.   Proposals to promote the use of compulsory licenses could inhibit technological development in the pharmaceutical sector in India and thereby undermine efforts to make medicines and other products widely available to patients.

Other key points raised in the OPPI’s commentary included:

• The use of compulsory licensing is rarely the best policy option and cannot be a suitable tool to deal with the long-term healthcare issues confronting India.
• It has been demonstrated that patents are not a principal barrier to access to essential medicines, particularly here in India.  The World Health Organization (WHO) determined that during 2000-2007 period, India had significantly greater lack of access to essential medicines than many African countries, even though it had excluded pharmaceuticals from patent protection for almost 30 years.

The US-India Business Council (USIBC), which represents nearly 350 global companies, also expressed concern that adopting the proposed policy would inhibit the growth of intellectual property-intensive industries. It will create uncertainty and have a chilling effect on innovation and investment.  Similar views have been expressed by BusinessEurope, a European trade body, and Japan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (JPMA), a drug industry lobby representing at least 68 top pharmaceutical companies in Japan.  (Source:  Livemint.com)

Gates Foundation – 60 Minutes Interview

A very interesting interview on 60 minutes with Bill and Melinda Gates highlighting the work and priorities of the Gates Foundation.

Asked what the foundation’s global priorities are, Melinda Gates said, “HIV/AIDS, malaria, mother-and-child deaths, in that order.”

New drug-resistant superbug spreading from India

A new superbug could spread around the world after reaching Britain from India and scientists say there are almost no drugs to treat it. (source: Reuters)

The new superbug – New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase, or NDM-1 – makes bacteria highly resistant to almost all antibiotics.

Almost as soon as the first antibiotic penicillin was introduced in the 1940s, bacteria began to develop resistance to its effects, prompting researchers to develop many new generations of antibiotics.

But their overuse and misuse have helped fuel the rise of drug-resistant “superbug” infections like methicillin-resistant Staphyloccus aureus (MRSA).

In a study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal on Wednesday, Walsh’s team found that NDM-1 is becoming more common in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan and is also being imported back to Britain in patients returning after treatment.

For many years, antibiotic research has been a “Cinderella” sector of the pharmaceuticals industry, reflecting a mismatch between the scientific difficulty of finding treatments and the modest sales such products are likely to generate, since new drugs are typically saved only for the sickest patients.

But the increasing threat from superbugs is encouraging a rethink at the few large drugmakers still actively hunting for new antibiotics, including Pfizer, Merck, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis.

Access to new test for drug-resistant TB must be improved: WHO expert

A World Health Organization expert called for greater access to a new diagnostic tool for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in the Western Pacific and southeast Asia.  The new diagnostic tool reduces the time needed to detect MDR-TB from eight weeks to two hours.

Drug-resistant TB emerges when patients fail to follow treatment regimens, take substandard drugs or stop treatment too early.  Patients with MDR-TB can then transmit the disease to others.

According to the WHO, there are 120,000 new cases of MDR-TB in the Western Pacific each year, which makes up 28 percent of the global caseload.  Combined with cases in southeast Asia, all MDR-TB cases in Asia make up 58 percent of the global caseload.

Number of drug-resistant TB cases, 2007

• India – 131,000
• China – 112,000
• Russia – 43,000
• Bangladesh – 15,000
• South Africa – 16,000

TB killed 1.8 million people across the world in 2008, or a person every 20 seconds. It is not only a scourge in poor countries but also in the West, where it has flared anew in the last 20 years because of AIDS, which weakens the immune system.

Fighting neglected diseases: anti-TB compounds offer hope

Compounds being developed against tuberculosis also show promise against deadly tropical diseases threatening millions of people.  As reported by Reuters, the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development has granted the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi) rights to develop a class of potential anti-TB compounds offering hope of treating Chagas disease, African sleeping sickness and leishmaniasis.

Chagas, a disease caused by a parasite found mainly in rural areas of Latin America, kills some 14,000 people annually and an estimated 8 million are infected. Infection is lifelong and can lead to heart disease and heart failure. Some 100 million people are deemed at risk of the disease.

Leishmaniasis and sleeping sickness, formally known as human African trypanosomiasis, each kill roughly 50,000 people a year and pose a threat to a combined total of 400 million people.

The Gates Foundation is providing a $1.5 million grant to DNDi for preclinical assessments of compounds specifically for use against visceral leishmaniasis, a deadly parasitic infection spread by the bite of a sandfly.

Though found in Europe, Asia and Africa, leishmaniasis is most concentrated in India. An estimated 350 million people worldwide are deemed at risk from infection.