Politics makes for strange bug-fellows
Rather than “royally” waste money funding infectious disease research for geopolitical reasons, developed nations must instead establish well-funded, well – connected consortia to help countries with the greatest chance of success, world health experts said today.
The recommendation comes exactly one week before the Bush-sponsored Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria doles out its first set of grants.
“We must move away from dispensing aid for geopolitical reasons, because such aid is usually royally wasted,” said Olusoj Adeyi, a senior health specialist at the World Bank. Speaking at a forum on emerging infections sponsored by the US National Academies of Sciences (NAS), the goal, he added, is to transform national entities “to a unified epidemiological system.”
Resources should instead be channeled into “countries that have the best ability to make progress, or make policies,” said William Steiger, of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
The Global Fund has thus far collected $2 billion in pledges from both public and private sectors. But combating infectious diseases is estimated to require tens of billions of dollars annually, according to the World Health Organization.
Because much of the money required will come from the private sector and philanthropic organizations ultimately, Steiger says, making the fund, and its operation, credible to the private sector is critical to its success.
At the same time, organizations cannot simply use corporate strategies in addressing emerging infections, cautioned Roy Widdus, of the Initiative for Public -Private Partnerships for Health. “We cannot adopt approach of business everywhere in international public health.”
While funding must be performance-based, Widdus added, “we need to make sure that it doesn’t divert our attention in thinking about how to help people who have been failed by their governments.”
As a consequence of globalization, disease burdens in the developing world are affecting the developed world, notes Adeyi. To combat infectious diseases around the world, developed nations must deploy their advanced disease-control capabilities and resources in should be deployed in developing ones.
Ensuring the effectiveness of these partnerships is going to require a lot of money, a long -term commitment, and the right reasons for helping developing countries, he added.
Several speakers also emphasized the importance of developing long-term programs in countries of need, rather than dumping enormous sums of money for the short term.
“Soft funding leads to squishy results,” said the Fogarty International Center’s Eric Mintz. Funding human resources does just as much “global good” as funding the development of products like vaccine, medicines, and new diagnostic technology, Mintz said, referring to his agency’s newly established program on funding US-trained foreign scholars to establish labs in their home countries.
Funding product development in the absence of personnel who can appreciate and properly utilize it, he added, is only taking care of half the job.
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