OpenForum – a blog by the Health and Human Rights community

In the struggle for global health funding — with some pitting AIDS against other diseases — we should remember a line from the movie All the President’s Men: “Follow the money.”

There doesn’t have to be a dichotomy between AIDS and other diseases on the world stage. While there is still a long way to go in terms of expanding HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, ongoing media research at the Boston University School of Public Health suggests there might be a great deal that proponents of neglected illnesses — like childhood pneumonia — can learn from the “success” of AIDS.

What makes a disease a “success”?

Over the past quarter century, there have been close to a million news articles about AIDS. The closest competitors for other infectious diseases are malaria and tuberculosis, with nearly 200,000 articles each.

Lower respiratory infections are the leading cause of burden of disease globally (in 2004, 94.5 million DALYs [disability adjusted life years]); more specifically, childhood pneumonia  kills 1.8 million children a year and remains the dominant cause of child mortality (20%). Yet there have been just 12,000 news articles about childhood pneumonia in the last 25 years.

When you look at funding, the differences are just as striking. From 1996–2003, HIV/AIDS received nearly half of all funds for infectious diseases in the developing world. Acute respiratory infections (which include childhood pneumonia) received 2.4%. Why?

Maybe it’s the story.

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GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), the world’s second-largest pharmaceutical company, has announced in its annual corporate responsibility report that it will donate more than 800 patents to a pool that will be open to all researchers trying to develop medicines for 16 neglected diseases, according to the Wall Street Journal. It also pledged to cut the price of 110 patented medicines in LDCs, the world’s poorest 50 nations.

Balancing intellectual property rights with global health considerations has long been a contentious issue in public health. The $800bn pharmaceutical industry has been criticized in recent years for putting profits ahead of the needs of people in the developing world. This announcement marks an important step toward increasing access to medicine in the developing world, and following through with several of the recommendations made by Paul Hunt, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to health from 2002-2008. Two years ago, he estimated that 2 billion people don’t have access to essential drugs, and urged that drugmakers support research for neglected diseases and cut prices in poor countries, among other recommendations in his guidelines for pharmaceuticals. Finally, a step in the right direction.

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