A neglected area of TB research has been diagnosis. Sputum microscopy – sometimes referred to as the “gold standard” for diagnosing TB – is time consuming, can only be conducted in the lab and often gives incorrect results. A rapid test that can be used on the front line is required. News of new funding [2] provided by the Gates Foundation to a non-profit group that focuses on this issue is much to be welcomed. Interestingly, a manufacturer of breath tests for disease diagnostics says it has developed a simple test that can diagnose active pulmonary TB within minutes – see TropIKA.net News in brief [3].

The importance of partnership is always stressed in TB control efforts. Important partners in the delivery of care include the private health care sector and it is disappointing that in India [4] many private practitioners do not apparently provide the recommended TB treatment DOTS (directly-observed therapy short course.)

Good news

Several recent TropIKA.net articles report good news concerning other infectious diseases of poverty. For example, a trial in India [5] found that a single transfusion of the drug amphotericin B, for which patients stayed in hospital for just 24 hours, was as effective in the treatment of visceral leishmaniasis (VL) as a course of treatment requiring a one-month hospital stay. This finding could have major implications; it would be possible to significantly increase the number of VL patients who receive treatment.

When new drugs are introduced they are not always popular with patients and this is bound to affect their compliance with the treatments they are prescribed – something that is not always taken into consideration when implementing new programmes. Much depends on the switch to artemisinin-combination therapy (ACT) as the standard treatment for uncomplicated malaria and it is reassuring to learn [6] that the introduction of the ACT Coartem in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania has met with a positive reception from the local community, including mothers whose children have been treated for malaria.

A TropIKA “Research in brief” article [7] includes further welcome news: a new insecticide could be in prospect for mosquito control, research at the “basic” level could lead on to the development of treatments for cholera and for the kinetoplastid diseases, and a drug already in use in veterinary medicine could be developed as a new treatment for onchocerciasis.

Looking to the future, research into sleeping sickness (human African trypanosomiasis) will be boosted by new Gates funding, and the Australian government has made new grants to researchers working on malaria [8]. In both these cases the research will be based in institutions located in developed countries, but there is a pressing need for more research to be done in disease-endemic countries themselves and for it to be conducted by nationals of those countries. This was the theme of the African Expert Meeting on Pharmaceutical Innovation in Africa, held in Pretoria, South Africa [9], where a call was made for support to enable the development and production of medicines, “in Africa, by Africans”. The registration in African countries of new drugs shown to be effective against the infectious diseases of poverty was also discussed at this meeting [10]. Robust registration procedures are of course necessary but they must not lead to unnecessary delays in bringing the fruits of scientific research to those who most need them.

Paul Chinnock
Editor, TropIKA.net

Such research, at the “basic” level, is essential if new tools active against malaria are to be developed, but putting effective interventions into practice is not easy. Research is also therefore needed at the implementation stage. A study in Tanzania [4] found that only a minority of women receiving bednets in a distribution programme were actually sleeping under them; studies like this one help to identify the points at which such programmes can fail.

The implementation of another new antimalarial tool – the rapid diagnostic test (RDT) – also continues to be the subject of research. A Nigerian study [5] asked people whether, if they were ill, they would pay to be tested with an RDT. The majority said they would do so and, on average, the amount they were prepared to pay was greater than the current cost of an RDT in Nigeria (about $1.25). Nevertheless, the study’s findings indicate that many people would not be willing (or could not afford) to be tested. It is therefore important that testing should be available free of charge. Further research in Tanzania [6] suggests that the introduction of RDTs could cut health care costs; malaria is considerably over-diagnosed and many antimalarials are given to patients who do not need them. (Tanzania is, by the way, one country where anti-malaria programmes are being significantly stepped up [7]).

But programmes to treat and control malaria must be integrated with those for other infectious diseases. It is good to hear of new funding that will enable the Malaria Consortium [8] to demonstrate how government-led integrated community case management programmes (iCCM) can be scaled up, so that more children with malaria, pneumonia and diarrhoeal diseases receive appropriate treatment.

A worrying story relating to the epidemiology of malaria has also been in the news during the last few days. It has become commonplace in the debate on climate change - which is likely to increase cases of many infectious diseases - to cite the rise of malaria in the East Africa highlands in order to demonstrate that global warming has already had such an impact. But where is the evidence that malaria has become more common in this part of Africa? When the UK government’s Department for International Development (DFID) issued a statement referring to the increase, an environmental campaigner asked to see the research on which the claim was based [9]. What he was sent was certainly not convincing. The need for reliable evidence on the prevalence of malaria has thus, once more, been underlined.

Also in TropIKA.net
News on other infectious diseases of poverty also appearing on TropIKA.net within the last few days has included an analysis of the funding provided for tuberculosis research worldwide [10] – it is growing but is still nowhere near the level that is required. It has also been demonstrated in a new study [11] that individuals with a low birth weight are particularly susceptible to TB.

Recent months have seen major outbreaks of cholera across Africa for reasons that are by no means clear. A new surveillance programme [12] is therefore a welcome development.

Leptospirosis is an important zoonosis (a disease of animals that can spread to people) in many countries but rarely receives attention from researchers. A study in India [13] suggests that the disease in people is spreading northwards.

And a TropIKA.net opinion article [14] looks at WHO’s response to the appearance of H1N1 (“swine”) flu. This infection seemed likely to pose greater dangers for people living in the world’s poorest countries. Did WHO exaggerate the threat or was it correct to err on the side of caution?

Paul Chinnock
Editor, TropIKA.net

There are of course many ways in which climate change threatens human health, including injury from extreme climatic events such as flooding, and food shortages caused by droughts. Many infectious diseases are also likely to become more widespread. Poor communities face the greatest threats and are least well placed to respond. Health inequalities are in consequence likely to widen.

The 15th UN Climate Change Conference (COP15) is now under way in Copenhagen, 7-18th December. So far, since the conference began, very little time appears to have been devoted to the infectious diseases of poverty, although some delegates have made reference to their concerns regarding the likely increase in certain infections including malaria, dengue, pneumonia and diarrhoeal disease.

The health community itself has come late to the climate change debate, seemingly content until now to leave it to climatologists and politicians but, in the run-up to the conference, the Lancet has performed a considerable service in highlighting the health dimension in a series of articles that deserves detailed scrutiny.

In the first week of COP15, other medical journals are also publishing editorials on the subject but, thus far, we have not seen the publication of new data timed to coincide with the beginning of the conference. Data, however, are needed to inform the debate and to determine the action that the world must now take to address climate change.

There is indeed so much that we do not yet know. As Tony McMichael of Australia’s National Centre for Epidemiology & Population Health points out in a TropIKA.net interview, how people will respond to climate change is more difficult to predict than climate change itself. Professor McMichael’s view is that far the biggest infectious disease risk from climate change is diarrhoeal disease. Others, however, have been more inclined to highlight the threats posed by vector-borne diseases particularly malaria, dengue and Chikungunya.

These are not the only diseases that could become more common in a warmer world. Schistosomiasis seems to be expanding its range in many countries. In a TropIKA.net interview Dr Justin Remais of Emory University, USA discusses his use of a mathematical model to quantify environmental impacts on transmission intensity.

But will there, for example, be any effect on tuberculosis as a result of climate change? We don’t know. We should not jump to too many conclusions or try to blame everything on climate change. It has been commonplace, for example, to blame the serious outbreaks of dengue now occurring in many countries on global warming, but this ignores the role of increasing urbanisation and the growth of populations in poor urban environments where vector control activities are inadequate.

We need to be better informed and research will be crucial in determining the effectiveness of efforts to adapt to a changing climate. As Andrew Githeko points out in a guest blog on TropIKA.net, the organisms responsible for the transmission of infectious disease have demonstrated their ability to adapt. We must now do the same.

See the TropIKA.net Copenhagen blog for other climate change developments that relate to the infectious diseases of poverty.

Paul Chinnock
Editor, TropIKA.net

TropIKA.net spoke, before the conference began, to ten researchers making presentations of particular importance. These interviews have been published within the knowledge hub. We will be conducting further interviews, in which we ask young African scientists and senior figures in malaria control for their reactions to these presentations. Some of the presenters we spoke to have views that could prove highly controversial. Frank Baiden from Ghana says we need to take a long, hard look at the data on malaria in Africa: “Do we have the numbers right?” he asks, “How confident are we that these cases are all malaria?” He and others we spoke to query whether the declines now being seen in case numbers in several parts of Africa are the result of new interventions, or whether something else is going on. James Tibenderana (Uganda) alleges that previous efforts to promote the integrated management of childhood infections have “died a natural death”. Paul Milligan (UK) says that the way in which data from vaccine trials are analysed should be changed, in order to provide better measures of their impact on disease burden. And Hilary Ranson (UK) says “alarmingly high” levels of insecticide resistance are now being recorded. Let other TropIKA.net readers know your opinion on what these researchers have told us.

Thanks to the Internet, there are now also virtual places to confer and TropIKA.net provides such a facility throughout the year – not just in the present ‘conference season’. We continue to report on major new developments relating to the infectious disease of poverty. A recent example is the publication of new estimates showing that Streptococcus pneumoniae and Haemophilus influenzae type B are responsible for as many child deaths as AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined.

Epidemics of other infectious diseases have also featured in our pages. This has been a very serious year for meningococcal meningitis in Africa’s meningitis belt, and cholera outbreaks have afflicted many parts of the African continent, including Nairobi – a city in which ironically malaria is not actually transmitted, according to new findings.

We have also highlighted reviews that provide updates on what is known about cholera and about fascioliasis, and a major report on global progress with vaccination programmes.

But we do not neglect the basic end of research. It will be interesting to see whether some very preliminary findings recently reported may one day lead to a role for chocolate in malaria treatment or for anti-obesity drugs to treat dengue fever. What do you think? Let us know.

Paul Chinnock
Editor, TropIKA.net

African presidents, in common with heads of state in other parts of the world, have varied in their level of commitment to the welfare of their people and in their position on the proportion of the national budget that should be devoted to health care. The creation of the African Leaders Malaria Alliance (see TropIKA.net News) must therefore be welcomed. ALMA is the first alliance at head-of-state level to combat the disease and has the potential both to improve the efficiency of control efforts, through international cooperation, and to mobilize national populations to work towards the elimination of malaria.

But commitments made by politicians are not always honoured. African presidents have previously pledged to spend 15% of their budgets on healthcare but few have delivered. Western leaders have also in many cases failed to provide the full level of development support that they have promised. Given the continuing global economic difficulties, there may be disappointments ahead. But malaria must surely be regarded as a special case. The disease burden is so great and the prospects for progress towards elimination are so much better than ever before that, if ever there were a time for commitments to be honoured, it must surely be now.

Meningitis also claims many lives in Africa. The latest of our TropIKA.net Profile articles features an interview with Marc LaForce, head of the Meningitis Vaccination Project. He describes how, once the final few hurdles have been cleared, a new vaccine designed specifically for Africa will become widely available.

Buruli ulcer (BU) is one of the most severely neglected of all the infectious diseases of poverty, but there have been modest increases in the funding available for research into this dreadful condition. We report on new genomic research on BU and on a planned study that should advance knowledge on the BU disease reservoir.

One way we can increase the attention paid to neglected conditions is to feature them in the media, but this has to be done in the right way – accurately and without scaremongering. Pakistan is one of many countries where the media has rightly highlighted the steady advance of dengue fever, but in such a way that a dengue diagnosis is now often interpreted by patients as being a death sentence. (The case fatality rate with dengue is of course very, very small.) Somehow a balance must be struck by the media to create sufficient public concern to prompt preventive action, without leading to widespread panic.

The TropIKA.net blog seeks to highlight items in the news that you may have missed. In recent days, these have ranged from the bizarre to the tragic. Some South African TB patients are reported to be selling their sputum to healthy people, who use it to fake a diagnosis of the disease and to be awarded a disability grant. In Papua New Guinea, which is experiencing its first cholera epidemic on record, fear of the disease is such that patients are said have been left to die at the side of the road, as no one is willing to take them to hospital.

For progress to be made against the infectious diseases of poverty we need, not only commitment, but also a better understanding - at all levels - of the true nature of the dangers they pose.

Paul Chinnock
Editor, TropIKA.net

Infectious diseases do not, however, take a holiday. The world’s poorest countries continue to suffer from the ravages of many infections. As we have reported on TropIKA.net, in Zimbabwe one of the worst cholera epidemics of recent years appears to be over but several other African countries, including Ethiopia and Kenya, are still coping with epidemic cholera. Zimbabwe itself may face a return of the disease in the forthcoming rainy season.

Dengue fever continues to wreak havoc in many parts of the tropics; a report from an expert group in the Philippines concludes that many cases are treated inappropriately. The impact that swine flu will have in developing countries is not yet clear.

TropIKA.net News has reported over the last few weeks on a number of initiatives to tackle the infectious diseases of poverty. Diagnosis is generally a neglected area, receiving less attention than prevention and treatment. However, the Stop TB Partnership’s New Diagnostics Working Group has launched new web resource called Evidence-based Tuberculosis Diagnosis. Also several African nations are drawing up plans to revamp their laboratories to qualify for World Health Organization laboratory accreditation under a new scheme designed specifically for developing countries.

There has been formal publication of data confirming the emergence of resistance to artemisinin - the drug that is the now the recommended treatment for malaria. A major international effort is already under way to combat this new public health crisis. The use of insecticide-treated bednets is another cornerstone of malaria control programmes and massive net distribution programmes now exist in many countries, but a recent study shows that many of the nets distributed are not used by the families who receive them.

More encouraging news includes advances in the understanding of how the parasite responsible for leishmaniasis manages to evade the human immune system so successfully. Leishmaniasis receives woefully inadequate attention and progress of this kind is to be welcomed. We also report that a new Chinese drug could be used to kill parasitic intestinal worms in regions where parasites are developing resistance to the widely used deworming drug albendazole. And efforts to develop a new tuberculosis vaccine will be stepped up thanks to new funding.

TropIKA.net’s Funding section includes details of opportunities that have come to our attention. Silly season or not, several new grants have become available in the last few weeks.

The Gates Foundation gives particular emphasis to finding new technological solutions – inevitable perhaps as Bill Gates made his money through technology. (We can only speculate what his approach to global health would have been had he become wealthy as a result of a career in the media, finance, energy or some other sector.) However, critics are asking whether the Foundation’s technological emphasis detracts attention from the social determinants of health, and from efforts to improve the delivery of existing interventions of proven effectiveness. Critics have also commented on the Foundation’s tendency to prioritise support for a small number of diseases; in particular there is a poor correlation between Foundation funding and the childhood disease burden. The Foundation not only provides a significant proportion of global health funding but also plays a part in setting priorities more widely. Perhaps the most important criticism is that it provides no information as to the processes it uses in deciding upon those priorities.

Priority setting has also created controversy elsewhere. A renewed appeal has been made, in another article in the Lancet, for the control of “neglected tropical diseases” (NTDs) to receive more funding. The authors particularly emphasise seven of the long list of NTDs that they consider to be both the most widespread and the most amenable to control. The seven include schistosomiasis; new research on the prevalence of this condition in Mali demonstrates that if successful programmes are not sustained then progress can easily be reversed.

Meanwhile, others make the point that diarrhoeal diseases are amongst the very biggest killers of poor children but have lost the position they once held on the priority list. Can we now say that they should therefore be added to the “neglected” category? A new report marks the start of attempts to restart international action against these diseases. We also carry news of a project which may lead to new treatments for diarrhoea but see, however, the cautionary note sounded in a TropIKA.net blog .

The last few days, have seen the emergence or re-emergence of other controversies. The use of DDT as part of malaria control efforts – see our news story – is an issue where passions have often run high. Also in the news and also likely to be controversial is the decision of an Indian company to continue the development of a new malaria drug, despite the fact that the Medicines for Malaria Venture with which it was in partnership decided to withdraw its collaboration following disappointing trial results.

And in America, details are awaited of what support the Obama administration [9] will give to global health. Announcements made from the White House have led some critics to accuse Obama of failing to deliver on his pre-election promises on, most notably, AIDS. However, the President has said that his new approach will be ‘comprehensive’. Whatever he decides will be controversial but it may be that previously neglected areas will receive more attention and that his priority setting will be more in line with the disease burden.

Perhaps then it is good that the infectious diseases of poverty have lately become the subject of so much controversy. It is an indication that the issue is now receiving attention at senior levels and that efforts are being made to identify the best ways forward. Controversy, however, should not be allowed to drag on for too long. Words must give way to action.

Paul Chinnock
Editor-in-Chief, TropIKA.net

China itself has a malaria problem in parts of the country, although it is not on the scale faced by Africa. The Chinese government has announced that, using more conventional methods, it expects to be able to eliminate malaria as a public health problem by 2015.

New ideas on cholera are badly needed, given the current African epidemic (see our report on the situation in Mozambique) and the high case numbers still found in many parts of Asia. No one believes that the global threat of cholera can be resolved solely through the development and deployment of an effective vaccine; this is truly a disease of poverty and it will be with us as long as millions of people are denied the right to safe water and sanitation. Nevertheless, an effective vaccine would make a major contribution and the low effectiveness of cholera vaccines in the field has always been disappointing. A possible explanation comes from a study in Bangladesh which indicates that people infected with intestinal worms have a reduced response to V. cholerae. Deworming programmes, important in their own right, could become an important part of cholera prevention efforts. The study has been published at a time when a new cholera vaccine is about to be brought into use in India. This vaccine was found to be 70% effective in an Indian trial and its performance within a public health programme will be followed with great interest.

New threats require policy makers to act swiftly and appropriately. Health systems have so far responded too slowly to the worsening problem of drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis. It is thought that fewer than 5% of cases are detected and fewer than 3% are treated according to WHO standards. In Beijing a meeting of representatives of 27 countries facing a high burden of drug-resistant TB heard the current situation described as “potentially explosive”.

New information on Buruli ulcer is sadly in short supply. There is considerable public alarm in many countries regarding this dreadful condition but at a conference in Cotonou it emerged that there is still no clear understanding as to how it spreads or even how commonly it occurs.

Regular readers of my Editor’s choice blog will know that I like to conclude by highlighting a new success in disease control. The encouraging progress made against onchocerciasis in Guatemala is a suitable way for me to sign off, but the last word must belong to the readers TropIKA.net. We are an interactive platform so please use the ‘Leave a Reply’ function below in order to share your views on some of these new developments.

Paul Chinnock
Editor-in-Chief, TropIKA.net