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WHAT'S NEW THIS SUNDAY: VACCINOLOGY COURSE, NEGLECTED TROPICAL DISEASES, ROAD MAP TO TACKLE NTDS, NTD JOURNAL

Saturday, 11th of February 2012 Print

WHAT’S NEW THIS SUNDAY: VACCINOLOGY COURSE, NEGLECTED TROPICAL DISEASES, ROAD MAP TO TACKLE NTDs, NTD JOURNAL 

  • VACCINOLOGY COURSE, CAPE TOWN, NOVEMBER 2012

Dear Vaccine Colleagues, 

The Vaccines for Africa Initiative (www.vacfa.com) will organise the 8th Annual African Vaccinology Course in Cape Town, South Africa, from 05 November to 08 November 2012. The course is intended for EPI managers, medical doctors, nurses, public health practitioners, academics, and scientists who work in the field of vaccinology on the African continent. 

We will accept applications for the course up to 31 May 2012. The sponsors of the course will cover basic expenses (i.e. travel, accommodation, meals, and course/conference material) for successful applicants to attend both the 8th Annual African Vaccinology Course (5-8 Nov 2012) and the first International African Vaccinology Conference (9-11 Nov 2012). 

More information is available from http://www.vacfa.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=264&Itemid=109 

 

Please direct queries to: Charles.Wiysonge@uct.ac.za  

 

Thanks, Charles

 

Charles Shey Wiysonge

Chief Research Officer & Associate Professor

Vaccines for Africa Initiative

Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine

University of Cape Town, South Africa

www.vacfa.com

www.iidmm.uct.ac.za

 

  • NEGLECTED TROPICAL DISEASES

Hot tropic

The world’s nastiest illnesses get some belated attention

Feb 4th 2012 | NEW YORK AND SIERRA LEONE | from the print edition

Best viewed at http://www.economist.com/node/21546005

 

GLOBAL health campaigns like grand goals. On January 30th Bill Gates joined the head of the World Health Organisation (WHO), 13 drug-company executives and others in pledging to eradicate or control by 2020 ten of the world’s nastiest diseases, which afflict more than a billion people. Guinea worm, sleeping sickness, bilharzia (which doctors call schistosomiasis) and the others rot tissue and cripple the organs. Even if they do not kill, they stunt children and sap adults’ energies.

The new push comes as a bolder set of ambitions hits trouble. As part of the Millennium Development Goals, world leaders promised in 2000 to curb the toll of HIV, malaria and tuberculosis by 2015. That brought a spending splurge—donations for health projects in poor countries more than doubled between 2001 and 2008 (see chart). The death rate for malaria dropped by more than a quarter. But the economic crisis has tightened fists. Christopher Murray of the University of Washington reckons annual spending-growth from 2009 to 2011 was only 4%. Excluding the World Bank’s money, mostly loans to middle-income countries, giving is nearly flat.

The whiff of mismanagement has lowered spirits too. The Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria (an outfit specially created to help meet the last lot of goals) is making no new grants until 2014. It had projected (too optimistically) a 20% rise in donations in 2011-13. On January 24th its director said he would step down.

The new effort includes American and British aid agencies but the impetus comes largely from Mr Gates, a tireless champion of global health. On January 26th he said he would give $750m to the Global Fund. Having announced in 2007 an “audacious goal” to eradicate malaria, his foundation (named after him and his wife Melinda) is now targeting the neglected tropical diseases. It will provide $363m of the $785m planned for fighting these ailments in the years to 2020.

Mr Gates praises big returns for low costs. At 50 cents per child per year, treating intestinal worms is the most cost-effective way to raise school attendance, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found. “Probably we should have gone after them earlier,” says Mr Gates. He hatched the new plan with pharma chiefs such as Andrew Witty of GlaxoSmithKline. Drug firms will donate 1.4 billion treatments each year.

The parasites and bacteria work in different ways. With river blindness, black flies spread larvae that when grown destroy eye tissue; mosquitoes do the same for the worms that block the lymphatic system in elephantiasis; hookworm, roundworm and whipworm are soil-born.

But as such diseases often plague the same places, it is possible to dispense several drugs together, saving money. Peter Hotez of the Sabin Vaccine Institute says administering azithromycin (for blinding trachoma), albendazole (for elephantiasis and soil-transmitted worms), ivermectin (for elephantiasis and river blindness) and praziquantel (for schistosomiasis) all at once could cost half as much per patient per year as stand-alone programmes. As well as donating these drugs, pharma firms will also sponsor early-phase research into newer medicines.

Some are sceptical; providing free drugs does not mean that people take them. Bruno Gryseels of the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp fears that blanketing regions with medicines will make bugs drug-resistant. Mr Gates’s lot stress the need for good monitoring to prevent that.

The new goals build on some existing successes. Since 2008, for example, volunteers in Sierra Leone have distributed drugs to fight elephantiasis, locally dubbed “big fut”. They measure children against a pole, using height to gauge dosage. But the earliest victory may be against an ailment with no vaccine or treatment. Guinea worm wreaks its havoc after larvae are swallowed in water. The female worm grows up to a metre long and breaks painfully through the skin, releasing eggs into water once more. Vigilant education and sanitation efforts from the Carter Centre, founded by a former American president, have nearly eradicated it. Nine to go.

 

Nature | News

  • ROAD MAP UNVEILED TO TACKLE NEGLECTED DISEASES

The WHO hopes to control or eliminate ten diseases by 2020.

30 January 2012

 

This article is best viewed at

 http://www.nature.com/news/road-map-unveiled-to-tackle-neglected-diseases-1.9938

The World Health Organization today laid out plans to control or eliminate a swathe of diseases that predominantly affect the world’s poorest people. To tackle neglected tropical diseases, as they are known, it is bringing together national governments, the pharmaceutical industry and philanthropists.

The initiative includes plans for a major expansion of programmes in which industry donates drugs for the treatment of such diseases, including Chagas disease, visceral leishmaniasis (also known as kala azar) and river blindness. The pharmaceutical industry, meanwhile, has pledged to increase cooperation to expedite the hunt for new treatments.

Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are estimated to affect more than one billion people worldwide, but because most of these people are in poor, rural areas of the developing world they have generally attracted little in the way of research efforts to find cures, or supply of treatments that already exist.

This has already started to change. In 2009, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced a US$34-million grant to boost work on these NTDs (see: Neglected disease boost).

At a meeting in London today, Margaret Chan, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), presented the group’s ‘road map’ for dealing with 17 neglected diseases in a co-coordinated effort with 13 drug companies, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and others.

Coordinated action

The WHO is focusing on drug treatments along with disease management, control of disease vectors and non-human hosts, veterinary public health, and improvements in sanitation and drinking water. The road map identifies 17 diseases, 10 of which the organization believes can be eliminated or controlled by 2020 (see Box).

It is, says Chan, the “most comprehensive, coordinated action” ever to address NTDs. “I’ve never seen so many competitors working together,” she told the meeting.

Diseases the WHO hopes to eliminate or control by 2020

Guinea worm
Lymphatic filariasis
Blinding trachoma
Sleeping sickness
Leprosy
Soil-transmitted helminthes
Schistosomiasis
River blindness
Chagas disease
Visceral leishmaniasis

The Gates Foundation announced the largest chunk of additional funding so far: a five-year, $363-million donation for research relating to NTDs, including new treatments and delivery.

“What’s unique about today is getting everybody on the same page,” said Bill Gates. He added that, given the scope of the new commitments, “maybe, as the decade goes on, people will wonder if these should be called neglected diseases”.

Drug companies in attendance announced expansions and extensions to many current efforts that supply free or at-cost drugs for NTDs. The combination of new and existing donations amounts to 1.4 billion treatments a year.

However, the charity Médecins Sans Frontières (also known as Doctors Without Borders) said that challenges in the area were being “glossed over” in the new road map. The emphasis on donations from pharmaceutical companies could mean that strategies are influenced by what products are made available rather than what is actually required for good public health.
 
“Expanded drug donations from the pharmaceutical industry will be part of the solution, but it is not possible to eliminate and control diseases such as Chagas, kala azar or sleeping sickness without increased support for programmes to identify and treat patients, and increased investment for new and better diagnostic tests and medicines,” said Daniel Berman, deputy director of Médecins Sans Frontières’ campaign for access to essential medicines, in a statement.

Compound collaboration

Eleven companies, including AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi and Bristol-Myers Squibb, are expanding their sharing of intellectual property on various diseases. They are either already working with or are negotiating agreements with the non-profit Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative. This work will share compounds in an effort to speed up the development of therapies, and follows similar moves to tackle malaria (see GlaxoSmithKline goes public with malaria data).

“Sharing libraries of compounds is extraordinarily difficult,” said Christopher Viehbacher, chief executive of Paris-based Sanofi. “It’s only because of the unmet need we’ve been able to get together. We’re starting to work together in partnership in an unprecedented way.”

Andrew Witty, chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline, headquartered in London, said that the opening up of compound libraries would ensure that the next generation of NTD treatments would be developed.

“What we’ve seen over the last year or so is a real coming together of industry.” he told the London meeting.

Witty cited an African proverb that states that if you want to travel fast you should travel alone, but if you want to travel far you should travel in a group. “The industry wants to travel far,” he said.

  • NTD JOURNAL

The Public Library of Science publishes a monthly, open access journal devoted to neglected tropical diseases. Those interested in it should go to http://www.plosntds.org/home.action

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