[afro-nets] UN Health Agency Expands Programme to Fight Neglected Tropical Diseases

["Vern Weitzel" <claudio@hcmc.netnam.vn>]

UN Health Agency Expands Programme to Fight Neglected Tropical Diseases
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Cross-posted from: UNNews@un.org

Buoyed by its success in saving an estimated 110,000 people who would otherwise have died from sleeping sickness over the past five years, the United Nations health agency today expanded its programme to fight some of the most neglected tropical diseases that destroy the lives and health of poor people.

This expansion is possible thanks to a renewed collaboration with sanofi-aventis, the world’s number 3 pharmaceutical company, which has agreed to donate medicines and financial support worth $25 million over five years to the UN World Health Organization (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2006/pr54/en/index.html).

Sanofi-aventis will donate $5 million in drugs to treat sleeping sickness and a further $20 million in financial support for the control of neglected tropical diseases, such as leishmaniasis, a skin disease that leaves lifelong ugly scars, Buruli ulcer, which destroys the skin and soft tissues, and the sometimes fatal Chagas disease, an insect-transmitted illness that attacks the heart, oesophagus, colon and the peripheral nervous system.

All four diseases are among the most neglected in the world. The people who suffer from them are almost all poor inhabitants of remote, rural areas.

The new project will take a common approach to detecting, preventing and treating the diseases, actively seeking out people who show early symptoms and giving them effective treatment before the symptoms worsen.

Sanofi-aventis President Jean-FranÃois Dehecq said: “With this new programme, we hope to contribute to saving many more lives and we are proud to be one of the major WHO collaborators to fight neglected tropical diseases”

Sanofi-aventis is the number 1 pharmaceutical company in France and in Europe.


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Vern Weitzel
mailto:vern@coombs.anu.edu.au