Registration has begun for a closed-door gathering allowing governments and stakeholders to hold open discussions about a fairer pricing system for medical products, led by the World Health Organization. The second meeting of the Fair Pricing Forum, this time in South Africa, comes as debates over drug pricing and access rise ever higher in developing and developed countries alike. Continue reading ->
Geneva-based Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, today announced the start of a major two-week campaign to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of people in Harare, Zimbabwe against typhoid, after an outbreak there. The campaign will be the first in Africa to use a new typhoid vaccine that can be administered to young children and is long-lasting. Nearly 2,000 cases of typhoid have been reported since a second wave of outbreak arose in September, Gavi said. Continue reading ->
Wellcome Trust, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the African Academy of Sciences have joined together in a new initiative to make clinical practice guidelines more efficient and adaptable for clinical trials that require less stringent approaches, such as those that take place during infectious disease outbreaks. Additionally, by applying a more flexible approach towards the application of these guidelines, the initiative also hopes to make them “future proof,” or able to better incorporate new technologies. Continue reading ->
Tafenoquine, the first new drug to be developed in over 60 years to treat relapsing malaria, has in fact been around since the late 1970s, when researchers with the US Walter Reed Army Institute of Research first took note of its antimalarial properties. But the drug’s potential to cure relapsing malaria caused by the Plasmodium vivax parasite, the less deadly but most widespread malaria species, has only been recently been recognised. Continue reading ->