By Matthew Curtin
A DOW JONES NEWSWIRES COLUMN
PARIS (Dow Jones)--It's a bargain.
For less than half a dollar per person a year, we could treat the 200
million people in Africa who suffer from at least one of nine debilitating,
often disabling, and frequently fatal tropical diseases.
Spend a bit more and the millions more who suffer the same ailments in the
tropics elsewhere benefit too.
Treating diseases that few in the West have to worry about today like
sleeping sickness, leprosy, roundworm, hookworm, and schistosomiasis mightn't
sound as urgent in London, Paris and New York as the risk of a new flu
pandemic.
But tell that to an African who's watching a three-foot guinea worm burrow
its way out of his body from his intestines through an infected sore on his
skin a year after he's had the misfortune to drink some infected water.
Eradicating these "infections of poverty" would bring big benefits in terms
of public health, social stability, and economic growth to some of the world's
poorest countries.
And given the political and popular support for the U.N.'s Millennium
Development Goals and the G8's commitment to make poverty history, you might
have thought it would be high up the agenda.
Yet too much of the debate about reducing poverty - as well as other big
issues of the day like energy and the environment - center on expensive, and
at best, partial solutions: from elusive miracle vaccines and blanket debt
forgiveness to the mirage of plentiful renewable energy resources.
But policies will only work if we recognize we have finite resources that
need to be spent on deploying the solutions we already have to the problems we
face as well as looking for new ones for the future.
Public health in the tropics is just one example.
As three experts in tropical disease argue this week in a paper on Africa's
"neglected" tropical diseases*, the worthy focus of the international agencies
and donors on combating HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria has been done at the cost of
integrating treatments of the other diseases into disease-control programs -
despite evidence that treating the neglected diseases would help reduce the
prevalence of the others.
And the difference with these other diseases - particularly for the millions
afflicted by them who've survived malaria and have don't have HIV/AIDS or TB -
is that the medicine is available and cheap, if not free: indeed, GSK, Merck
and Pfizer are donating three of the key drugs required.
Some of the money and infrastructure is there too, thanks to six
private-public partnerships involving the WHO, drug companies, and the Gates
Foundation among others.
The authors of the report reckon that just $200 million spent each year for
five years of would be enough for a multipronged preventative treatment
program for 500 million people.
It would be nice if this sort of hard-nosed practical thinking sobered up
policy makers in the health field and replaced the endless dithering
elsewhere. Take trade liberalization - as the billion dollars a day rich
governments spend subsidizing their farmers is again under the spotlight -
and reassessing the benefits of nuclear power, for starters.
* "Rapid-impact interventions:" How a policy of integrated control for
Africa's neglected tropical diseases could benefit the poor, by D.H. Molyneux,
P.J. Hotez, A. Fenwick.
(Matthew Curtin has been a financial news reporter since 1990, and has
reported on international finance and business for Dow Jones Newswires - from
South Africa, Singapore and now Paris - since 1994. He can be reached at +331
4017 1740 or by e-mail: matthew.curtin@dowjones.com)
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
10-11-05 1044ET |
