OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Tuesday
AN international anti-tuberculosis initiative, the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development, has launched a campaign to develop a more effective, cheaper treatment for the disease – which cripples poor countries across the world – by 2010.
The organisation, which was formed in Bangkok in October, has opened a head office in Cape Town to coordinate and fund research in tuberculosis in developing countries.
“There has not been a major new treatment for TB for the past 30 years, so we are going to try and find one by 2010,” Carlos Morel, the chairman of the alliance’s board and a UN World Health Organisation programme director, said after opening the centre.
The director of the research drive, Bernard Fourie, said the programme was aimed at finding a “drug that is more effective so that it needs to be used for a shorter time.”
“We want to reduce the treatment period by at least 50%, otherwise what we achieve is not very dramatic.”
The medicine needed to cure a tuberculosis victim currently costs about $60 but the long treatment period – about six months – makes it hard to ensure patients complete treatment. And interrupted treatment in turn gives rise to drug resistant strains of the disease.
Fourie said the infrastructure costs of prolonged treatment was crippling for the poor countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America that are home to most TB sufferers.
“If we could find something that costs $1_000 but consists of one single injection then we might be saving money,” he said.
But, he said, by themselves “the current tools will not be sufficient” to cope with the “disastrous” worldwide increase in tuberculosis which is fuelled by the spread of HIV/Aids.
This is reversing the gains made against TB in Africa and Asia, and India seemed set to follow suit as AIDS spreads there, he said. According to the World Health Organisation there are an estimated eight million new tuberculosis cases and at least two million deaths per year worldwide.
Morel said international organisations were partly to blame for the lack of new treatments to fight the rise in TB as “we thought the battle was won.”
The Global Alliance for TB Drug Development was started with $40m in funding from the Rockefeller and the Gates foundations in the United States. – AFP