NEW YORK, Mar 14 (Reuters Health) - Millions of people in the developing world die every year from diseases such as malaria and sleeping sickness because new medicines that could help them are either too expensive for distribution or not profitable enough to spur development by drug companies, a panel of public health experts gathered here Thursday charged.

"Something has terribly failed," said Dr. Morten Rostrup, international president of the aid group Doctors Without Borders. "We lack the drugs, we lack the tools to really treat these patients--it's as simple as that."

Doctors Without Borders and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Working Group organized the press conference, entitled "The Crisis of Neglected Diseases."

Dr. Els Torreele, the working group's chair, joined Rostrup in appealing for a not-for-profit drive to increase global research and development on new treatments for infectious disease. Such efforts must be based not on market calculations or cost-effectiveness, they said, but on patients' needs.

Torreele and Rostrup joined the World Health Organization's Dr. Krisantha Weerasuriya from India and a Thai government research official, Dr. Krisana Kraisintu, to focus attention on diseases afflicting the developing world, particularly tuberculosis, sleeping sickness, malaria and kala azar, or visceral leishmaniasis.

Two million people die each year of tuberculosis, 98% of whom live in poor countries, according to the conference organizers. More than three-quarters of people with tuberculosis have no access to treatment.

Only 7% of people at risk of sleeping sickness have access to proper diagnosis and treatment; the disease kills 65,000 people annually.

Resistance is rising to existing treatments for malaria, which kills one child every 30 seconds. And the main drug used to treat kala azar, which kills 500,000 people every year and is virtually 100% fatal without treatment, is too expensive for most of the disease's victims.

Drug companies are developing a treatment for the form of kala azar that strikes pets, but largely ignoring the human form of the disease, according to the conference organizers. Pets, they noted, offer a better return on investment.

This occurs, panelists suggested, because of an environment in which research is driven not by health needs, but by drug companies' need to get the most 'bang for their research buck.'

Torreele pointed out that while 72% of the world's population resides in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, those regions account for only 13% of drug company market share due to widespread poverty, leaving local patients and doctors to rely on whatever old, and sometimes toxic, drugs they can find.

"You need a paradigm shift to make sure drugs are being developed as a public responsibility," said Torreele. "The most neglected diseases affect those with no purchasing power whatsoever.... We need to develop a not-for-profit strategy for drug development, otherwise no drugs will ever be developed for these diseases."

Rostrup and Torreele said they are in an "exploratory phase," in which drug development and public health experts are meeting with governments and corporations to try to jump-start a new initiative focusing on these ignored diseases.

"Of course, we have a lot of problems," Rostrup told Reuters Health. "There is the problem of (medical) infrastructure--not just not having the drugs, but how to reach the patients. But this fact shouldn't have any influence on the pursuing of the development of new drugs. Otherwise we will just wait and wait. And this is not acceptable at all."

　　From Reutershealth.com