NAIROBI, May 16, 2006 (AFP) - Kenya and Brazil joined forces on Tuesday to press donors and wealthy governments for more funds to develop treatments for neglected diseases that mostly affect poor people.
The two nations said they would co-sponsor a resolution calling for such action at a meeting next week of the World Health Assembly (WHA) in Geneva at which global health priorities are to be addressed.
"Developing countries have the capacity to provide new solutions for old diseases," said Davy Koech, director of the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI).
"But every day we see how difficult it is to get support for research and development into diseases that affect the poor for which there is no profitable market," he told reporters here.
"We must put public health above private profit," said Ahmed Ogwel of Kenya's health minstry.
Guilherme Patriota, a representative of Brazil's foreign ministry, said the resolution would give governments the "opportunity to wake up from their slumber on essential health research and development."
"We have begun to move in the right direction but it is essential that we develop better and new health tools to improve the long-term health both of patients and economies of developing countries," he said.
While global spending on health research has increased from 30 billion dollars (23 billion euros) in 1986 to 105.9 billion dollars in 2004, only about 10 percent of that is spent on diseases which affect 90 percent of the world's population, according to the Global Forum for Health.
Those diseases include kala-azar, sleeping sickness, malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS and the World Health Organisation (WHO) says at least three billion dollars (2.3 billion euros) should be directed annually at health priorities of the poor.
The Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative, an independent non-profit organisation founded in 2003, hailed the Kenya-Brazil partnership as an important step to publicize the need.
"It is time for the world governments to heed the call from Kenya and Brazil ... and to take a leading role in defining health priorities," said the group's executive director Bernard Pecoul.
More than six million people die every year from neglected diseases, 97 percent of them in impoverished developing countries, according to the group that aims to develop new, improved and field-relevant drugs to treat them.
Sleeping sickness threatens 60 million people in sub-Saharan Africa who have few treatment options. Kala-azar kills 60,000 people each year but the most common treatment was developed back in the 1930s.
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