Tropical diseases that affect mainly poor people cost billions of dollars in lost productivity annually and companies must be encouraged to make medicines to treat them, the World Health Organisation said on Thursday. The United Nations agency, in its first report on neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), urged governments and donors to invest more in tackling 17 diverse infections often shunned by researchers, which can cause blindness, heart damage and death.
It said the diseases often cost only pennies to treat. They include Chagas disease, which affects about 10 million people in Latin America, and dengue fever, another virus transmitted by infected mosquitoes which the WHO said was rapidly spreading world-wide and now poses a risk to developed countries.
"Neglected tropical diseases blight the lives of a billion people world-wide and threaten the health of millions more," WHO director-general Margaret Chan said in the report, "Working to overcome the global impact of neglected tropical diseases". "Production of medicines used to treat NTDs must be made more attractive to companies that manufacture generic pharmaceuticals," she added.
Leading drug makers have already provided high-quality medicines free of charge for hundreds of millions of poor people suffering from such diseases, mainly in remote areas of Latin America, Asia and Africa, according to the WHO. Earlier on Thursday, GlaxoSmithKline announced it would donate up to an extra 400 million doses of its de-worming drug albendazole, at a cost of some 12 million pounds ($19 million) a year, to the WHO to treat African children at risk of intestinal worms.
Chris Viehbacher, chief executive officer of Sanofi-Aventis, said it was renewing a five-year commitment to donate $25 million in drugs and cash for WHO programmes against sleeping sickness, Chagas, leishmaniasis and Buruli ulcer. "It is not just a problem of access to medicines but you have to ensure that people are properly screened and that health professionals are educated in how to use sometimes toxic drugs," Viehbacher told a one-day meeting at WHO headquarters.
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