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Gates foundation funds new Polio vaccine to accelerate eradication efforts
The World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF announced today that they have received grants totalling US$ 10 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop and introduce a powerful new polio vaccine – a critical part of the strategy to end poliovirus transmission worldwide by the end of 2005.
The new vaccine, monovalent oral polio vaccine type-1 (mOPV1), will be more efficient at boosting immunity against poliovirus strain "type 1" than today’s trivalent vaccine, which works against all three polio strains. Epidemiologists believe the new vaccine could help to bring a swift end to polio through mass immunization campaigns across areas where virus types 2 and 3 have already been eliminated.
The Gates Foundation funds will help WHO and UNICEF together with a qualified vaccine manufacturer to develop, licence and introduce mOPV1 by May 2005. The vaccine will be used initially in Egypt, which has successfully eliminated poliovirus types 2 and 3, and could soon be made available to other areas where only type-1 poliovirus remains.
The mOPV1 will be produced and licensed under the oversight of the drugs regulatory agencies of France and Egypt. The Egyptian government will train health workers in the use of the vaccine and conduct post-marketing surveillance. WHO will be responsible for overall coordination of the project, with UNICEF procuring and delivering the vaccine to the government of Egypt. Of the total grant amount, US$ 3 937 500 will be disbursed by the WHO and US$ 6 152 500 by UNICEF.
The Gates Foundation has been a strong supporter of polio eradication, previously providing US$ 75 million in funding. "The Gates Foundation grant plays a catalytic role in mOPV1 development," said M. A. Tag-El-Din, Egyptian Minister of Health and Population, "This will help support the national efforts to get rid of the virus once and for all."
Polio once crippled 350 000 children a year globally. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative, a 16-year, US$ 3 billion project, has reduced the number of cases by over 99% to just over a thousand children in 2004. Polio will be the first disease to be eradicated in the 21st century and only the second disease ever wiped out by humankind, after smallpox.
The Global Polio Eradication Initiative is spearheaded by the World Health Organization, Rotary International, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and UNICEF. The polio eradication coalition includes governments of countries affected by polio; private sector foundations (e.g. United Nations Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation); development banks (e.g. the World Bank); donor governments (e.g. Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Qatar, the Russian Federation, Spain, Sweden, United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States of America); the European Commission; humanitarian and nongovernmental organizations (e.g. the International Red Cross and Red Crescent societies) and corporate partners (e.g. Sanofi Pasteur, De Beers, Wyeth). Volunteers in developing countries also play a key role; 20 million have participated in mass immunization campaigns.
WHO framework convention on tobacco control enters into force
On 27 February, The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control enters into force, becoming binding international law for its first 40 Contracting Parties. The WHO FCTC is the first global public health treaty created under the auspices of WHO designed to save millions of lives now lost to tobacco.
Country Parties to the Convention will be bound by provisions set out in the Treaty. These include: comprehensive tobacco advertising bans, price and tax increases, health warning labels on tobacco products and measures to protect people from second-hand tobacco smoke, among other tobacco control strategies.
The final text was adopted unanimously by the World Health Assembly on 21 May 2003. By 29 November 2004, 40 countries had become Contracting Parties to the Treaty - the trigger which brings it into force 90 days later. Since 29 November, 17 more countries have ratified, making it one of the most rapidly embraced UN treaties in history.
Several opportunities are available to media, and include a media briefing in Geneva on 24 February, interview possibilities on the 25th and 28th, and an invitation to attend a ceremony for the entry into force on Monday 28 February at WHO Headquarters.
Media has still a major role to play in order to support the FCTC. Several opportunities are available to media from 24 to 28 February at WHO Headquarters.
For more information please contact:
Dr Fatima El-Awa
Regional Adviser/Tobacco Free Initiative
Tel: +202 2765340
Fax 002-02-6702492
Email:
Web: WWW.emro.int/tfi/tfi.htm
First global report on efforts to roll back Malaria
Cairo/Geneva/NewYork – More people are accessing prevention and treatment services for malaria, sparking hope that the number of people who become sick and die from malaria will begin to decline. However, challenges remain to reduce the burden of the disease, which still kills one million people every year, most of those in Africa, according to the 2005 World Malaria Report.
The report, released today by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), finds that progress has been made in preventing and treating malaria since 2000. It finds that more countries are introducing the newest medicines to treat malaria, and that more people are receiving long-lasting insecticide-treated mosquito nets through innovative new programmes. The report analyzes malaria data collected through 2004 and represents the most comprehensive effort ever made to present the available evidence on malaria worldwide.
“Many countries are moving forward with malaria control programmes, and even those with limited resources and a heavy malaria burden now have a better opportunity to gain ground against this disease," said Dr LEE Jong-wook, Director-General of WHO. "However, proven interventions such as insecticide-treated nets, and the latest artemisinin-based combination therapies must reach many more people before we can have a real impact on malaria."
A number of countries are now engaged in intense antimalarial campaigns. In particular, more and more people are protected with insecticide-treated nets - a highly effective method of malaria prevention. In Africa, all countries reporting on nets collectively had a 10-fold increase in the number of insecticide-treated nets distributed over the last thee years.
After a 2003 campaign to distribute treated nets in five districts of Zambia at least 80% of children under five were sleeping under the nets. A similar campaign across Togo in December 2004 succeeded in raising the overall percentage of households owning at least one treated net from 8 % to 62 %.
“At present malaria remains the infectious disease that takes more lives of children in Africa than any other—three times as many as HIV infection,” said Ann M. Veneman, Executive Director of UNICEF. “If we are going to dramatically reduce child deaths in the next decade, we need to put more focus on combating malaria.”
Countries where the former mainstays of malaria treatment, such as chloroquine, are no longer effective are also moving forward on new therapies. Since 2001, 42 malaria-endemic countries, 23 of them in Africa, have adopted artemisinin-based combination therapies recommended by WHO. These are the latest generation of antimalarial medicines and the most effective treatment against falciparum malaria, the deadliest form of the disease. An additional 14 countries are in the process of changing their malaria treatment policy; and 22 have embarked on home-care programmes, which enable families and other care-givers to manage malaria.
The recent shortage of artemisinin-based combination therapies has hindered efforts to reduce the impact of the disease, but sufficient supplies to meet demand are expected to be available by the end of 2005, thanks to the combined efforts of UN agencies, other multilateral agencies, non-profit groups and corporations working together under the umbrella of the Roll Back Malaria Partnership.
Due to the difficulties involved in gathering reliable information about malaria in most affected countries—and because those countries have intensified their efforts only in the past few years—it is too soon to measure the impact on illness and death of the recent expansion of malaria control strategies. A measurable effect should become apparent about three years after widespread implementation.
The report finds that in 2003, some 350 to 500 million people worldwide became ill with malaria—a slight revision of the estimate of 300 to 500 million annual cases that WHO has used since 2000. The reasons for this difference are advances in data collection methods and increases in the world’s population. Current methods do not allow for a more precise estimate, given that malaria is most often not diagnosed with certainty as well as the scarcity of reliable data from the communities where it occurs.
Halting and reversing the incidence of malaria by 2015 is a target of the Millennium Development Goals. The more immediate goal of Roll Back Malaria is to halve the burden of malaria worldwide by 2010. A major obstacle to achieving that goal, the report explains, is a lack of funds. The report estimates that US$ 3.2 billion per year is needed to effectively combat malaria in the 82 countries with the highest disease burden. This year, US$ 600 million was made available for global malaria control. WHO and UNICEF welcome the recent World Bank announcement of its plan to commit US$ 500 million to US$ 1 billion over the next five years, which will help more people get access to essential malaria prevention and treatment.
For more information, please contact:
Cairo:
Melanie Zipperer, WHO. +41 79 477 1722, mo bile: +41 79 477 1722,
Geneva
Prudence Smith, Roll Back Malaria Partnership, +41 22 791 4586 and mobile; +41 79 477 17 44 ;
New York:
Erica Kochi, UNICEF, New York, +1 212 326 7785,
Oliver Phillips, UNICEF, New York, +1 212 326 7583,
Judith Mandelbaum-Schmid, WHO 41-22-791-2967, Mobile 41-79-254-6835,
