More research funding for tuberculosis (TB) and more diverse funding methods needed: the participants at the meeting in the European Parliament to launch MSF’s report were in broad agreement over both the findings and the conclusions of MSF’s latest TB funding analysis. The MSF study was published November 12 ahead of a two-day conference organised by the European Commission on TB and other diseases connected with poverty.
The director of MSF’s Access Campaign, Dr. Tido von Schoen-Angerer, opened the meeting by outlining the real desperation felt among MSF medical staff faced with the inadequacy of the tools available to treat TB. And the urgency of the situation was aggravated, he said, by the emergence of drug-resistant strains of the disease and its spread through HIV-infected populations. “Instead of getting better, the TB epidemic is getting worse as it is spreading rapidly, particularly in Africa, together with HIV."
Professor Steward Cole, a scientist working on TB drug development and head of the Global Health Institute, Lausanne, Switzerland, supported MSF’s position and said that while total research funding by the European Commission (EC) had increased, part of the funding allocated to TB had actually fallen. He commented that while Europe was home, in his view, to many of the top researchers in TB research, they weren’t able to attract sufficient funding for their work. Many, discouraged, therefore went elsewhere to continue their work. He argued that Europe risked becoming marginalized in this important area of research and that now was not a time to cut budgets despite the global financial squeeze. “This is not the time to cut funding. Quite the contrary, we demand an increase in the budget,” Cole said.
“We do not only need more money for TB research, but we also need to change the way how this money is spent,” added MSF’s Dr. von Schoen-Angerer. He urged the European Commission to invest, for instance, in a prize fund for a rapid, affordable, point-of-care TB test – a financing mechanism which eliminates the need for high prices to recover research and development costs
Hanno Laang, a European Commission official dealing with health issues, was very broadly in agreement with the figures on which the MSF report was based: he conceded that although additional 20 million euros had been allocated for research funding in 2007, there had not been time to disperse the money adequately. He also deflected criticism in the report that no money had been spent on funding research into TB diagnostics, saying that several projects funding TB diagnostics research were underway though they did not show up in the figures for 2007. He said the EC was trying to pay more attention to the needs for research funding for neglected diseases and suggested that the EC was doing well to provide nearly one quarter of all the public research spending for TB in the European Union (including therefore all member states).
After some discussion, Dorette Corbey, a Dutch socialist Member of the European Parliament brought the meeting to an end, concluding that while market failure certainly was a major reason why new TB drugs had not been developed, European governments, too, had failed in their responsibilities to fund urgently-needed research.