Tropika

10/20/2008
http://www.tropika.net/svc/news/20081020/Chinnock-20081020-News-TuBerculosis-Conference

Calls for increased funding made at major TB conference

Paul Chinnock

The International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (IUATLD), which seeks to promote lung health in low-and middle-income countries, has held its 39th Union World Conference on Lung Health in Paris, 16-20th October. Prior to the event campaigners claimed that there was still a shortfall in funding to combat TB.

The theme of the Conference was ‘Global threats to lung health: the importance of health system responses.’ A wide range of other topics also received the meeting’s attention including: the increased use of tobacco in developing, health education, Mycobacterium bovis TB, and multi-drug resistant TB. Several sessions of the conference were recorded and are available for permanent viewing from the Kaiser Family Foundation website.

In advance of the Paris event, a TB campaign organization – the Treatment Action Group (TAG) is reported to have stated in a press conference that there was an alarming shortfall in government and private sector spending to support TB research compared to the commitments called for in the Global Plan to Stop TB.

TAG says that, between 2006 and 2007, overall funding for TB research and development (R&D) increased by just 6%, or $26 million. In 2006, funding increased by 16%. Given biomedical inflation and the devalued US dollar, TB research is thus failing to grow. At this pace, less than half of the $9 billion recommended by The Global Plan to Stop TB: 2006-2015 will be spent on TB R&D by 2015.

TAG’s Executive Director Mark Harrington said: ‘Tuberculosis research and development investments need to increase fivefold to $2 billion a year to achieve the goals of The Global Plan to Stop TB 2006-2015.  After documenting TB research investments for 2005 through 2007 – the last three years for which complete data are available – we can now say with certainty that promises made by world governments and the private sector to supply the needed TB investment specified in The Global Plan are not being kept.  In fact, TB research appears to be stagnating at less than $500 million per year – much too little to fund the science needed to develop the new diagnostics, drugs, and vaccines that could make TB a disease of the past.’

However, the Consortium to Respond Effectively to the AIDS/TB Epidemic (CREATE), also in the run-up to the conference, announced a $32 million donation from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to complete three ambitious large-scale clinical trials to improve the management of HIV associated tuberculosis in Brazil, South Africa, and Zambia.

Richard Chaisson, Director of the Center for Tuberculosis Research at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, who leads CREATE, said the new resources came at ‘a pivotal juncture, just as CREATE’s research is making significant  progress in finding public health interventions that prevent people from becoming sick and dying from TB.’ However, he too called for further funding to enable the full implementation of the Global Plan to Stop TB.