Africa Science News Service

14/10/2008
www.africasciencenews.org/asns/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=732&Itemid=2

Group reveals stark TB funding shortfall

By Henry Neondo

A report by the Treatment Action Group (TAG) finds 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.

The report was released at a press conference today in Paris in advance of this week’s 2008 World Conference on Lung Health and the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease.

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

"Tuberculosis is the most common, preventable cause of death among people with HIV," said Francoise Barré-Sinoussi, who last week shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. “Expanded, accelerated research to combat tuberculosis--including HIV-related TB--is a key part of the world's struggle against both diseases.”

Richard Chaisson, M.D., Director of the Center for Tuberculosis Research at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, who leads CREATE, says the new resources come 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. 
But we need to implement the comprehensive Stop TB Strategy recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) to eliminate TB in the future: faster detection and diagnosis of TB, more effective treatment and preventive therapy, and better TB diagnostics, drugs, and vaccines. 
Failure to fully finance The Global Plan to Stop TB -- including $20 billion in TB research--would be unacceptably costly in terms of needless suffering and loss of life.
Lack of investment today could mean widespread outbreaks of drug-resistant TB tomorrow, and progress against AIDS sacrificed, at a high cost in lives.

The new report from Treatment Action Group (TAG), Funding Trends in TB R&D 2005-2007: A Preliminary Report, finds 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%. Thus reported TB R&D investment appears to be slowing rather than accelerating.

Given biomedical inflation and the devalued U.S. dollar, the report notes, TB research is 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."

"We should have left TB behind in the 20th century and it is a disgrace that we failed. The Global Fund is fully supportive of the The Global Plan to Stop TB and committed to play its part in financing the fight against TB with new treatment and better interventions. Therefore TAG has done a service in highlighting the donors' shortfall," said Dr. Michel Kazatchkine, Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.