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National governments need to prioritise research for health

17 Nov 2008

TropIKA.net Editorial Team

Source: TropIKA.net

Health research is a matter of life and death, according to six speakers at the opening press conference yesterday (Sunday) at the Global Ministerial Forum on Research for Health in the West African nation of Mali.

Carel Ijsselmuiden, the Dutch/South African director of the Switzerland-based Council on Health Research For Development (COHRED) told the Bamako meeting that national governments needed to push harder to establish their own research priorities. He noted that in sub-Saharan Africa, donor focus on infectious diseases such as HIV, malaria and tuberculosis meant a corresponding lack of funding for major child killers such as diarrhoea, as well as pneumonia, illnesses of old age, environmental health issues and traffic accidents.

In Mali, for example, the new malaria research centre is funded by the US-based National Institutes of Health and not by the taxpayers of Mali, Ijsselmuiden said as fellow panelist Lasseni Konaté from the Mali Ministry of Health nodded.

In other examples, Uganda lacks a list of health research priorities, a health research policy or even a director of research in the health ministry ‘so how can you argue with any of the funders?’ Ijsselmuiden asked. And Nigeria, he said, had done ‘very little’ since the government attended the 2004 meeting in Mexico on the same topic.

Timothy Evans, the Canada-born assistant director-general of the World Health Organisation, said that work was underway to check if donor policies were triggering a negative impact, such as an intensive evaluation that was ‘looking at the extent to which health priorities could be skewed by the Global Fund to fight HIV, malaria and TB’ but cautioned that ‘the evidence that donors are altering health priorities is mixed’.

‘For Nigeria and for many other countries, we don’t know how many deaths there are and we don’t know the causes of those deaths,’ he noted, calling for an investment in better basic data.

‘It’s wonderful to have better interventions to address malaria or TB or whatever but need much more research into how health care systems work so we can address their problems,’ said Ok Pannenborg, a US-based senior health advisor for the World Bank.

Julie Hasler, a natural sciences specialist from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation from Paris, France, said she was pleased that UNESCO had joined the debate about improving health research for the first time since the debates started in Thailand in 2000.

The health research debates happen every four years in different countries, which is why they are sometimes referred to as the Health Research Olympics. Nearly 60 health ministers from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America are attending the conference, which ends on Wednesday. For more information, go to www.bamako2008.org.

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