Are you a Health Professional? Jump over to the doctors only platform. Click Here

Paediatricians seek to add cancer therapies to WHO essential drugs list

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Paediatric oncologists are to ask the World Health Organisation to add leukaemia therapies to the essential drugs’ list, one of their leaders said on Friday.

Professor Tim Eden, president elect of the International Society for Paediatric Oncology/Societe Internationale d’Oncologie Pediatrique, told APM that a request would be submitted in the next few weeks.”About 80 percent of children with cancer still do not get treatment,” he said. In sharp contrast, three quarters of children who developed leukaemia in western countries were cured.”We are not talking about new drugs where companies have to recover their development costs. Most are generic and need not be expensive,” the Manchester-based Cancer Research UK physician added.Placing anti-cancer drugs on the essential drugs’ list and selectively reducing their price in developing nations would require the agreement of the WHO, the World Trade Organisation, and the pharmaceutical industry.While drug companies have made major strides over the past couple of years to cut the price of drugs for HIV and other infectious diseases in developing countries, they have yet to accept this principle across the therapeutic spectrum.WHO policy is to focus on “increasing access to essential drugs for treating the major diseases of poverty, including malaria, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and childhood illnesses”.The International Society for Paediatric Oncology was founded in the late 1960s and now has more than 1100 members worldwide.(Source: Reuters Health: Richard Woodman: February 13, 2004: Oncolink)


Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Dates

Posted On: 16 February, 2004
Modified On: 3 December, 2013

Tags



Created by: myVMC