The Times of South Africa recently reported the recall of two TB drugs, manufactured by Pharmascript, after the national health department found them to be substandard. Initial tests at the local WHO laboratory found they did not contain the needed amount of active ingredients, as claimed on the label, and concluded that they "would most likely not have effectively treated 'thousands' of TB patients."
The market for artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) for malaria is notoriously complicated, and has received a great deal of recent attention as the subject of the proposed Affordable Medicines Facility-malaria.
On Wednesday we at CGD had the pleasure of hosting Jessica Cohen for a presentation of her Brookings Working Paper authored jointly with Pascaline Dupas and entitled Free Distribution vs. Cost-Sharing: Evidence from a Malaria-Prevention Field Experiment in Kenya.
In spite of the endless analysis and hovering media attention during the new Congress's "100 hours," one of the first major budget decisions has somehow gone largely unnoticed: the Democrats decided to nix the Republican's 2007 budget request and continue funding programs at FY06 levels. As Desmond Tutu wrote in Monday's Washington Post, the effects of this decision could be tragic for many Africans infected or affected by HIV/AIDS:
In the best health news of the year (so far!), a new New England Journal of Medicine study has found that delaying the start of a nevirapine-based antiretroviral therapy by six months can prevent the development of drug resistance in HIV-positive women who took single-dose nevirapine during labor to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the virus.
At its latest meeting, the GAVI Alliance board committed $200 million to support the introduction of new vaccines against rotavirus and pneumococcal disease in developing countries; the Washington Post subsequently ran an editorial in support of the decision.
At the last World Health Assembly in May 2006, the WHO member states passed a resolution establishing an intergovernmental working group to "develop a global strategy and plan of action including to provide a framework to enhance research and development into diseases that disproportionately affect developing countries," which will meet for the first time December 4-8 under the leadership of Dr.
I left the Toronto AIDS Conference last week unsettled. One of the purposes of these conferences is to bring together most of the people working in the field to share lessons and re-energize us to fight harder and do more to help people infected and affected by the disease. But Toronto felt like a professional trade show. Why?
