Newsvine - Treatments for 'Neglected Diseases' Urged

Newsvine - Treatments for 'Neglected Diseases' Urged: "NAIROBI, KENYA — The sickness starts with the bite of a tiny sand fly and mutates quickly from there — chills, then fever, then an onslaught of black lesions that will most likely prove fatal within six months without treatment.

Known as kala azar — a Hindi word meaning Black Death — the disease has killed more people than the 21-year civil war in Sudan, many of them extremely poor children.

'The people who are affected by the problem are poor. That's why we call it a neglected problem,' said Dr. Willy Tonui of the Kenya Medical Research Institute, or KEMRI, in Nairobi. 'Since you're dealing with a poor population, they won't be able to purchase the drug.'

With the United Nations' 192-member World Health Assembly meeting in Geneva, the governments of Kenya and Brazil have sent a resolution asking the panel to urge governments to set drug research priorities based on disease burden. According to the U.N., less than 10 percent of investment in health research goes to diseases "

(..)
Medicins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders, says the disease killed a third of the population in Sudan's Western Upper Nile region between 1990 and 1994 — 100,000 of 300,000 people. The organization says it is a tragedy comparable to the bubonic plague of medieval times.

Treatment involves a 30-day course of injections.