Filed under WHO

Burkina Faso has become the first country to run a nationwide campaign to vaccinate citizens against the most common causes of meningitis. The vaccine costs just 50 cents. It has been under development for 10 years, at a cost of $50million. But The World Health Organisation reports that this development cost and speed is actually relatively impressive:

the development of MenAfriVac cost only US$ 50 million - a fraction of the amount usually required to develop and bring a new vaccine to market… The rapid development of the vaccine is in large part due to the commitment of the Serum Institute of India, Ltd., the vaccine manufacturer. Africans have in the past waited as long as 20 years for a vaccine to travel from the industrialized north to the nations of the south. In this case, MenAfriVac will be introduced in Africa before it is distributed anywhere else.

WHO also reports that:

If MenAfriVac is introduced throughout sub-Saharan Africa, the resulting reduction in cases of meningitis is expected to free up more than US$ 120 million in the period up to 2015, money from national budgets which would otherwise be spent on medical costs for diagnosis and treatment. These funds can then be brought to bear on other problems of disease and poverty that weigh so heavily on the region. 

See here for the full story.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has produced its first ever report into Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs). It carries a hugely promising message: “It is entirely possible to control neglected tropical diseases. Aiming at their complete control and even elimination is fully justified.”

The report stresses that

There are already, “Good medicines are available for many of these diseases, and research continues to document their safety and efficacy when administered individually or in combination.”

The WHO report also highlights the cost-effectiveness of tackling NTDs, and how the benefits of such action would reach widely beyond healthcare. For example:

“On the basis of the estimated rate of return to education in Kenya, deworming is likely to increase the net present value of wages by more than US$ 40 per treated person. Benefit-to-cost ratio = 100. Deworming may increase adult income by 40%. The economic cost of trachoma in terms of lost productivity is estimated at US$ 2.9 billion annually.”

Here is a good starter article on the report, with a link to the report pdf itself in the first paragraph.

Here is the WHO’s own short article launching the report.

The World Heath Organisation has reported record levels of drug-resistant tuberculosis. Of the 9.4 million new cases of TB that emerged in 2008, 440,000 were multidrug-resistant, and approximately 25,000 were extensively drug-resistant.

Stop TB Partnership, the anti-TB charity recommended by Giving What We Can, works closely with the WHO, and treats standard TB at a cost of US$22.40 per person. Multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB), however, is far more expensive to treat, at $5,000 per person. Treatment for extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB) is even more costly.

The WHO expects that over 1.3 million people will need treatment for M/XDR-TB over the next five years. Such treatment would cost US$16 billion. Developing countries’ budgets are set to far far short of this.

The WHO article highlights HIV as a likely factor in increasing people’s susceptibility to drug-resistant forms of TB, revealing a further benefit to reducing the prevalence of HIV/AIDs. Mass media education and education for high-risk groups are the most cost-effective ways to do so, but unfortunately Giving What We Can knows of no charities that focus solely on these interventions.

See here for the WHO article.

This WHO article reports that the international community is set to meet, and possibly even exceed, the Millenium Development Goals for access to safe drinking water. However, improvements in sanitation look set to fall short of the MDGs by about one billion people.

The article reports that presently 884 million people lack access to safe drinking water (to put this into context, the population of Europe is 731 million). About three times as many people lack basic sanitation. 1.5 million children under five die every year because of unsafe water, sanitation or hygiene, and the poor, women, and those living in rural areas remain by far the worst affected.

See here for the World Health Organisation’s article, which goes into far greater depth.