Obama Administration Called on to Expand Treatment for Neglected Diseases

25 February 2010

The Obama Administration is being asked to expand the Global Health Initiative to treat more so-called neglected diseases.

The call for greater coverage comes from the medical aid group Doctors Without Borders and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi).

DNDi Executive Director Jana Armstrong says neglected diseases “are a group of diseases that affect primarily, almost exclusively, really, marginalized poor population in developing countries. They’re diseases that are debilitating or killing. They are diseases that have been historically kind of ignored.”

They don’t affect the large numbers of people that diseases like malaria, TB and HIV/AIDS do, Armstrong says.

“However, they do affect over a billion people in the developing world.”

Global Health Initiative

“First of all, it’s the only initiative of its kind. So, we don’t want to criticize the fact that there is a Global Health Initiative and that neglected tropical diseases feature within that GHI because there aren’t others that do that,” Armstrong says.

Doctors Without Borders and DNDi are concerned, she says,because the GHI aims to treat only seven of the 14 diseases officially listed as neglected by the World Health Organization.

“If you limit to seven of the total, you’re not looking at the whole picture,” she says.