Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), an international medical humanitarian organisation, is calling on the Commission to increase its funding "five-fold" into research for medical tools to fight tuberculosis (TB).
"This is ever more urgent given TB's rapid spread among people living with HIV and the rise of drug-resistant strains of the disease, which do not respond to many of the commonly-used treatments," MSF underlines. "Europe's responsibility here is clear," said Dr. Tido von Schoen-Angerer, director of MSF's campaign for access to essential medicines. "Countries right on Europe's doorstep - and even within the European Union - are struggling against resistant strains of the disease. But the research budgets remain pitifully low," he added.
Speaking at a conference on poverty-related diseases on 13 November, EU Research Commissioner Janez Potočnik acknowledged that "sitting in our comfortable European homes, with well-developed healthcare systems, it is all too easy to forget about the pernicious impact that infectious disease has across the world".
He noted that AIDS, TB and malaria - the "terrible triangle" - kill five million people each year and that a health crisis of this dimension was disastrous not only on a personal level, but also "a major obstacle to development" and thus a threat to humanity.
The aim of the conference was to identify research priorities for these three main killers and consider ways of increasing the impact of EU-funded research to combat them.
"It's all about research responsibility," said Potočnik, listing the roles of different stakeholders on the issue. According to him, all countries should take responsibility through targeted policies and real cooperation, while the pharmaceutical industry should plan and implement more focused R&D strategies to deal with the problem.
He urged donors to continue helping developing countries' governments to design and implement sound and comprehensive research and health policies. He further urged scientists to team up with policymakers and businesses in this regard.
