Doctors take aim at 'poor people's diseases'
Geneva - The aid group Médecins Sans Frontires and five partners have launched a campaign to develop medicines against tropical diseases.
They want to target scourges such as sleeping sickness that have been largely neglected by drug companies.
The Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDI) aims to invest millions into finding treatments for sleeping sickness, leishmaniasis and Chagas' disease.
These threaten about 350-million to 500-million people a year, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders, MSF) said yesterday.
Barely 10% of research is directed at diseases which cause 90% of cases of illness in the world, according to the World Health Organisation.
MSF said "neglected diseases" affect people who are so poor that they do not form an attractive commercial market for research into new drugs.
The other partners in DNDI are France's Pasteur Institute, India's Medical Research Council, Malaysia's Health Ministry, Kenya's Medical Research Institute and Brazil's Oswaldo Cruz Foundation.
MSF said DNDI would seek agreements with pharmaceutical companies on expertise, as well as private donations, and would focus on encouraging greater public sector health care. - Sapa-AFP
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