Tropical diseases plague poor but treatment cheap: WHO

Municipal workers fumigate the area outside the Indira Gandhi Stadium, one of the venues for the Commonwealth Games, in New Delhi October 5, 2010.

GENEVA (Reuters) - Tropical diseases that affect mainly poor people cost billions of dollars in lost productivity annually and companies must be encouraged to make medicines to eliminate them, the World Health Organization said on Thursday.

The United Nations agency, in its first report on neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), urged governments and donors to invest more in tackling 17 diverse infections often shunned by researchers, which can cause blindness, heart damage and death.

It said the diseases often cost only pennies to treat. They include Chagas disease, which affects about 10 million people in Latin America, and dengue fever, another virus transmitted by infected mosquitoes which the WHO said was rapidly spreading worldwide and now poses a risk to developed countries.

"Neglected tropical diseases blight the lives of a billion people worldwide and threaten the health of millions more," WHO director-general Margaret Chan said in the report, "Working to overcome the global impact of neglected tropical diseases."

Leading drug makers have already provided high-quality medicines free of charge for hundreds of millions of poor people suffering from such diseases, mainly in remote areas of Latin America, Asia and Africa, according to the WHO.

"Research and development in diagnostics, medicines and vaccines play a crucial role in the way forward," Chan told a one-day meeting of experts. "In fact, if we keep doing the right things better, and on a larger scale, some of these diseases could be eliminated by 2015, others by 2020."

Earlier on Thursday, GlaxoSmithKline announced it would donate up to an extra 400 million doses of its de-worming drug albendazole, at a cost of some 12 million pounds ($19 million) a year, to the WHO to treat African children at risk of intestinal worms.

FIVE-YEAR COMMITMENT

Chris Viehbacher, chief executive officer of Sanofi-Aventis, said it was renewing a five-year commitment to donate $25 million in drugs and cash for WHO programs against sleeping sickness, Chagas, leishmaniasis and Buruli ulcer.

"It is not just a problem of access to medicines but you have to ensure that people are properly screened and that health professionals are educated in how to use ... sometimes toxic drugs," Viehbacher told the talks.

Sanofi also had a one billion euro program to develop a vaccine against dengue fever, he added.

Swiss drug maker Novartis this week announced new support to treat 1.1 million leprosy patients. The five-year deal to provide multidrug therapy is valued at $26 million.

The cost of treating a patient with lymphatic filariasis using ivermectin and albendazole, donated by Merck and GlaxoSmithKline respectively, ranges from just five to 10 U.S. cents, according to the report.

The mosquito-borne disease causes intestinal worms and disfigures limbs and genital parts, costing an estimated $1.3 billion a year in lost productivity in Africa and South East Asia, it said.

Major drug companies including Pfizer, Merck, GSK and Johnson & Johnson provided $500 million worth of donations in 2009 to the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to Richard Greene, director of infectious diseases at USAID.

Such public-private partnerships were vital to getting increased congressional support for funding, he said.

(Editing by Philippa Fletcher)