CGD Policy Blogs

UNITAID: maybe you’ve heard of it, or maybe not. Launched in 2006, UNITAID has lived in the shadow of its older and bigger global-health siblings (the Global Fund, GAVI, and PEPFAR, to name a few). Perhaps due to its relative obscurity and late entry to a crowded global-health field, UNITAID has proactively worked to differentiate itself through a focus on commodities, market shaping, novel funding sources, and innovation. To wit, UNITAID’s stated mission is “to contribute to scale up access to treatment for HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis for the people in developing countries by leveraging price reductions of quality drugs and diagnostics, which currently are unaffordable for most developing countries, and to accelerate the pace at which they are made available.”

Technology is not the answer to all the world’s problems, but advances in medical diagnostics and therapeutics have the potential to improve the lives of millions of the world’s poorest people who suffer from diseases that have few, if any, effective treatments. While recent efforts by product development partnerships (PDPs) and donors like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Institutes of Health have made tremendous progress in building a pipeline for health products for neglected diseases, we have a long way to go before many of these life-saving therapies reach patients.

As some of you may know, CGD’s Drug Resistance Working Group released a report this summer, providing a comprehensive examination of drug resistance—across different diseases, geographies, and stakeholders. The report highlights alarmingly high rates of drug resistance throughout the world and warns of a growing public health crisis as more and more drugs lose their efficacy.

This is a joint post with Katherine Douglas.

I’d be willing to bet that nary a H8 meeting (if you have to ask….) has included a discussion on the impact of heart disease, obesity, or diabetes in developing countries. Yet chronic diseases, particularly cardiovascular disease (CVD), have emerged as a significant—and growing—threat to those living in poor countries.

Yesterday, the U.S. Institute of Medicine released an early version of a report entitled Promoting Cardiovascular Health in the Developing World: A Critical Challenge to Achieve Global Health. The report details governments, global health institutions, and development agencies’ lack of attention to CVD and offers recommendations to better prevent and control the disease.