Just published and highly relevant to the Bamako meeting is a new report from Oxfam - Crisis in Public Health: Promoting pro-poor medical innovation

Oxfam says money is still being misspent and calls for new approaches to be developed. According to the report: “…it is a combined responsibility of all countries to find ways to ensure global R&D is organized to improve human health; inability to pay should not disenfranchise a large majority of the world’s population from access to effective healthcare.”

The report will be considered in more detail on TropIKA.net shortly. Meanwhile an Oxfam press release is available here and the report in full may be accessed here.

How much attention will the world’s press pay to the 2008 Global Ministerial Forum on Research for Health in Bamako? The issues being addressed are crucial to the health of the world’s poorest people but so often such matters do not seem to interest the media. A search on the net today reveals very little in the way of pre-meeting coverage.

It is good therefore to see a report that three Sierra Leonean journalists will be present at the meeting. Other countries from which there will be journalists attending include Liberia, Guinea, Nigeria, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Togo, Senegal, Russia, Ivory Coast, Benin and Palestine.

Read the full report here.