Tropical disease victims suffer silently: WHO

About one billion of the world's poorest people suffer debilitating chronic infectious diseases such as dengue and leprosy, so companies need to be encouraged to create medicines to treat those afflictions, the World Health Organization says.

The United Nations health agency issued its first report on 17 neglected tropical diseases on Thursday and urged governments to invest in fighting infections and parasitic afflictions over the next decade that mainly affect people in remote areas of Latin America, Asia and Africa.

"They cause massive but hidden and silent suffering, and frequently kill, but not in the numbers comparable to the deaths caused by HIV/AIDs, tuberculosis or  malaria," said WHO director general Margaret Chan.

The consequences of long-term infection vary depending on the disease, and can include blindness, disfiguring scars and ulcers, severe pain, limb deformities, impaired mental and physical development, and damage to internal organs.

Diseases linked to poverty offer little incentive to the pharmaceutical industry to invest in developing new or better products, Chan said in the report.

Yet some of the diseases could be eliminated by 2015 or 2020, Chan said.

Progress is being made in tackling some of the diseases, she noted. Reported cases of sleeping sickness have now dropped to their lowest level in 50 years, and dracunculiasis, also called guinea worm disease, will be the first disease eradicated not by a vaccine,  but by health education and changes in behaviour, WHO said.

The agency said several pharmaceutical companies have announced more funding to fight neglected tropical diseases:

• GlaxoSmithKline announced it would donate up to an extra 400 million doses of its de-worming drug albendazole, at a cost of $19 million US a year, to the WHO to treat African children at risk of intestinal worms.
• Sanofi-Aventis said it was renewing a five-year commitment to donate $25 million in drugs and cash for WHO programs against sleeping sickness, Chagas, leishmaniasis and Buruli ulcer.
• Bayer is in discussions with WHO regarding its current commitment to fight sleeping sickness and Chagas disease.
• EISAI has committed to work towards the global elimination of lymphatic filariasis by providing diethylcarbamazine.
• Johnson&Johnson has recently also announced expanding its donation of mebendazole to supply up to 200 million treatments per year for treatment of intestinal worms in children.

Some of the diseases, such as dengue, are neglected because the victims lack a political voice and rarely affect travellers, the report said.

The report's authors recommended better identification of the diseases, better sanitation and control of insects and animals that can spread diseases to humans, and more medications, such as tablets taken once or twice a year to fight disease.