/ 1 January 2002

Millions still dying from preventable diseases

Aids killed 3-million people last year. The year before, tuberculosis killed 1,7-million and malaria more than a million others.

Aids killed 3-million people last year. The year before, tuberculosis killed 1,7-million and malaria more than a million others. Millions more died from diarrhoea and other easily preventable illnesses.

A decade ago, world leaders at the Earth Summit in Rio promised to tackle diseases of the poor. But with so many of the world’s most vulnerable still dying in droves, many health activists are furious that more has not been done to save them.

”We are losing 6-million people every year to Aids, TB and malaria alone, 14-million to communicable disease. This is not progress,” said Rachel Cohen, representative with Medecins Sans Frontieres, the medical aid group known in English as Doctors Without Borders.

”You really have to think twice about whether this health revolution that is being talked about in the West is any way benefiting the people that need it the most,” she said.

Leaders meeting at the World Summit for Sustainable Development starting on Monday in Johannesburg will again discuss ways to fight preventable diseases in the developing world.

In recent years, there have been some stunning successes.

In 1988, when the world launched its drive to eradicate polio, 350 000 new cases of the deadly disease were reported. Last year, following massive immunisation campaigns, the World Health Organization said just 480 new cases were reported.

It also said a campaign against leprosy has cut new cases by 85% over the past 15 years and eliminated it from 98 countries. But other diseases have gotten far worse.

Between 1990 and 2000, the number of people infected with tuberculosis in Africa and Eastern Europe, regions highly vulnerable to the disease, jumped from 200-million to 450-million.

HIV infections jumped from 8-million to 10-million people to 40-million.

Meanwhile, resistant strains of malaria have spread across the world, forcing many poor African countries to exchange their cheap and increasingly ineffective drugs for more potent medicine that can cost 10 times as much.

The Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria was created last year with hopes of distributing $7-billion a year of the estimated $10-billion in aid needed to tackle these diseases. But only $2-billion has been pledged to the fund.

”The amount that is needed is just four days’ global military spending. So the 10-billion is not an unreasonable demand,” said Jo Nickolls, a policy adviser at Oxfam GB.

In some cases, rich countries have damaged the already weak health care systems in many poor countries, activists said.

Countries including Canada, Great Britain and the United States have tried to solve their nursing shortages by recruiting health workers from countries such as South Africa, which have shortages of their own.

Efforts to enforce patent rights for HIV medicines have also kept available but expensive treatments away from those too impoverished to pay, Nickolls said.

For many other diseases, there are no new drugs and no plans to make any, she said.

According to Oxfam, global drug research and development spending is about $70-billion, but only 10% of that money goes to research on diseases that account for 90% of the world’s infections.

”There’s very little interest in creating medicines that can cure people who are poor in a poor country,” Nickolls said.

Many of the poor countries themselves have shown a lack of political will to tackle many of these diseases, Cohen said, especially Aids.

The disease, which disproportionately affects people of working age, has killed the main breadwinners in many families, decimated the ranks of skilled workers and left tens of millions of children orphaned in the most vulnerable countries. Many of Africa’s scarce teachers will die and millions of children, forced to help support their families, will no longer attend school.

The economies of the hardest hit countries could fall by eight percent by 2010, according to UNAids.

”Sustainable development is great. But if we can’t bring Aids under control, forget about development at all, much less sustainable development,” said Dr. Peter Piot, director of UNAids. Many health activists cautiously hope the summit might help spark a true war against these diseases.

”All we can do is continue to make the case that it is not acceptable to let millions of people die,” Cohen said. – Sapa-AP