Reprinted with permission from: The Global Health Blog – a project of PubHealth.org
By: Sarah Arnquist
List of NTDs
Neglected tropical diseases attracted the media spotlight this month, starting with a New York Times op-ed by Peter Hotez, president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute.
Now, Hotez and Bernard Pecoul, executive director of Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi), have released a “manifesto” outlining why the global community should increase financial support for NTD control, elimination efforts and research and development.
“About three-quarters of total neglected disease R&D annual spending is for HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, leaving only about US$600 million worldwide for all NTDs per year,” they write.
Last week, the open-access journal, PloS Medicine, hosted a debate over the best approach to tackle neglected tropical diseases. (For a quick overview read the blog post, “Neglected diseases: teach or treat?” from The Scientist.) The debate centered on whether the focus to eliminate the diseases has been overly medicalized at the expense of focusing on social determinants of disease and how future resources and investments should be best allocated to balance implementation and R&D.
The debate and dialogue are great and necessary, but calls for any additional funding, regardless of how it’s allocated, begs the question where will the money be raised.
While global health experienced a “golden age” of new financial commitments during the last decade, international development assistance for health has flat-lined. Given the plurality of funding demands, including HIV prevention and treatment, chronic diseases, trauma and injury and neglected tropical diseases, many say merely sustaining — let alone expanding — financial assistance requires new “innovate financing” models for global health.
Innovative financing examples include:
- UNITAID — an international fund that uses revenues from taxes on airline tickets to promote lower prices and improved access to drugs, bed nets, etc.
- Advance Market Commitments (AMCs), in which legally binding commitments to pay for new life-saving vaccines aim to stimulate faster and larger industry investments in R&D.
- International Financing Facility (IFF) — rich country governments make long-term pledges to collateralize commercial debt financing.
- Debt Swaps – rich country creditors write off debts owed by developing countries if they convert a portion of the debt value to disease control activities.
Sarah Arnquist is the editor of The Global Health Blog, part of PubHealth.org, a project aimed to create an online mechanism to facilitate harmonization among international health care researchers, practitioners and funders. Arnquist writes case studies on global health delivery issues and previously worked as a journalist. She has a master’s in public health from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
