Despite Friday’s commitment by G-7 countries to donate another US$ 4.3 billion to a global COVID vaccine campaign, World Health Organization Director General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has accused high-income nations of still undermining equitable vaccine rollout by “doing deals” with manufacturers that deplete supplies available to the COVAX global vaccine facility.  Speaking at the […] Continue reading ->
IBADAN, NIGERIA — A new fixed-dose combination (FDC) tuberculosis (TB) treatment could improve the ease of treatment regimes, increase the availability of treatments, and get the world back on track to achieve the goal of ending TB.  The short-course preventative treatment, consisting of two drugs – rifapentine and isoniazid – will reduce the pill burden […] Continue reading ->
With ten of the world’s most infectious diseases not catered by drug firms, pharmaceutical giants remain unprepared to tackle future pandemics, a new report has said. The report, published on Tuesday, found that though current medicine and vaccine research and development is primarily geared towards the COVID-19 pandemic, there are next to no efforts to […] Continue reading ->
While very low-income countries have experienced relatively low mortality rates from COVID-19, they can expect higher mortality caused by the knock-on effects of the pandemic on their fragile health systems, according to the Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria. Since the pandemic first overwhelmed health systems in early 2020, […] Continue reading ->
The demands of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic are draining resources from global health research and development (R&D) programs and disrupting clinical trials and other work, presenting a potential post-pandemic scenario of a world more vulnerable to a host of infectious threats. That’s what our organization, the Global Health Technologies Coalition (GHTC), learned after conducting extensive, […] Continue reading ->
A US$40 million research consortium has been created to repurpose existing medicines for hepatitis, tuberculosis and malaria into long-acting treatments that can benefit low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) where people often have trouble accessing medicine over and over again, Unitaid experts told Health Policy Watch. The consortium on Tuesday launched the new Centre of Excellence […] Continue reading ->
WHO’s Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Friday issued yet another plea to leaders of rich countries to “honor their pledges” to fund COVID-19 vaccines sufficient to immunize the highest risk groups across the world. He spoke a day after South African officials raised the spectre that the world was heading towards a state […] Continue reading ->