Calls for increased funding made at major TB conference

20 Oct 2008

Paul Chinnock

Source: International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (see original article)
Source: Africa Science News Service (see original article)
Source: Foreign Policy in Focus (see original article)
Source: News-Medical.net (see original article)
Source: Science Centric (see original article)

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The logo of the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease.

The International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (IUATLD), which seeks to promote lung health in low-and middle-income countries, has held its 39th Union World Conference on Lung Health in Paris, 16-20th October. Prior to the event campaigners claimed that there was still a shortfall in funding to combat TB.

The theme of the Conference was ‘Global threats to lung health: the importance of health system responses.’ A wide range of other topics also received the meeting’s attention including: the increased use of tobacco in developing, health education, Mycobacterium bovis TB, and multi-drug resistant TB. Several sessions of the conference were recorded and are available for permanent viewing from the Kaiser Family Foundation website. (Next year’s conference will be held 3-7 December 2009 in Cancun, Mexico with the theme ‘Poverty and lung health’.)

In advance of the Paris event, a TB campaign organization – the Treatment Action Group (TAG) is reported to have stated in a press conference that there was an alarming shortfall in government and private sector spending to support TB research compared to the commitments called for in the Global Plan to Stop TB.

TAG says that, between 2006 and 2007, overall funding for TB research and development (R&D) increased by just 6%, or $26 million. In 2006, funding increased by 16%. Given biomedical inflation and the devalued US dollar, TB research is thus failing to grow. At this pace, less than half of the $9 billion recommended by The Global Plan to Stop TB: 2006-2015 will be spent on TB R&D by 2015.

TAG’s Executive Director Mark Harrington said: ‘Tuberculosis research and development investments need to increase fivefold to $2 billion a year to achieve the goals of The Global Plan to Stop TB 2006-2015. After documenting TB research investments for 2005 through 2007 – the last three years for which complete data are available – we can now say with certainty that promises made by world governments and the private sector to supply the needed TB investment specified in The Global Plan are not being kept. In fact, TB research appears to be stagnating at less than $500 million per year – much too little to fund the science needed to develop the new diagnostics, drugs, and vaccines that could make TB a disease of the past.’

However, the Consortium to Respond Effectively to the AIDS/TB Epidemic (CREATE), also in the run-up to the conference, announced a $32 million donation from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to complete three ambitious large-scale clinical trials to improve the management of HIV associated tuberculosis in Brazil, South Africa, and Zambia. Richard Chaisson, Director of the Center for Tuberculosis Research at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, who leads CREATE, said the new resources came at ‘...a pivotal juncture, just as CREATE’s research is making significant progress in finding public health interventions that prevent people from becoming sick and dying from TB.’ However, he too called for further funding to enable the full implementation of the Global Plan to Stop TB.

Other new developments in tuberculosis

A US-based think tank, Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF), studied two decades of data from 21 countries in the region to examine how International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending programmes related to changes in the number of TB cases, carriers, and deaths. After taking into account economic downturns, as well as other alternative explanations and country-specific variables, FPIF concluded that exposure to IMF programmes increased TB rates. IMF reforms were found to reduce healthcare resources identified as critical for TB control. The IMF described the findings, published earlier this year, as ‘phoney science’. Now the FPIF has released a response to the IMF’s criticisms.
Researchers at Aberystwyth University, UK, have licensed the fruits of their research to a non-profit product development partnership, the Aeras Global TB Vaccine Foundation, which is working to develop new, more effective vaccines against TB. The researchers discovered a new family of proteins that were able to resuscitate bacteria found in and around the human body. When awoken from dormancy the bacteria are more susceptible to attack from antibiotics. The discovery could lead to a vaccine that might help prevent the establishment of persistent infections; alternatively it might prevent persisting organisms in individuals with latent TB from reawakening.
There has been considerable interest in the results of a study recently published in PLoS Genetics, which identified new gene that may confer susceptibility to pulmonary TB, Investigators at the Genome Institute of Singapore and their collaborators in the Netherlands, Indonesia, UK and Russia report that the gene, named toll-like receptor 8 (TLR8), which had been previously shown to recognise some factors from viruses including HIV, also has a probable role in human susceptibility to M. tuberculosis. ‘We are really excited about this discovery as it is the first time TLR8 has been implicated in bacterial infections,’ said Dr Sonia Davila, GIS Research Scientist and first author of the article.
Scientists in Denmark found that a bone infection in a child with genetic immunodeficiency was caused by a newly described species of bacteria – Mycobacterium arosiense. The discovery may help improve the diagnosis and treatment of similar infections, according to a study in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology.