TB Fight Gets $70M Boost

U.S. pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co. said Thursday that it will donate $70 million to fight a drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis.

The company will team up with drug companies in developing countries, the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to tackle multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, or MDR-TB. The contribution would be given over four years, he said.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, who joined Taurel and U.N. health officials at the Geneva news conference, said the move was timely.

"We found a cure for TB 50 years ago, but half a century later it appears the biggest challenge lies ahead," as the disease mutates and becomes harder to fight, Thompson said.

In 1904, 188 of every 100,000 Americans died from TB. Patients spent up to a decade locked in isolation sanitariums before doctors in the 1940s discovered drug that could beat the TB bacteria.

The death rate in the U.S. in 2000 was 0.3 per 100,000.

"Many people in the developed world think of TB as a disease of the past," said Thompson. "They are mistaken."

MDR-TB is a variant of tuberculosis that can develop in patients who fail to complete the proper treatment for the standard disease. Improper treatment allows TB bacteria that have a natural resistance to a drug to multiply in the patient's body.

People whose immune systems are weakened by HIV/AIDS are also more vulnerable to both forms of the diseases.

Like regular tuberculosis, MDR-TB it is spread by coughing or sneezing and usually affects the lungs.

Among the 9 million people infected by both forms of TB every year, some 400,000 are hit by MDR-TB, most of them in poor countries. WHO estimates that each patient infects around 20 people.

In many TB hotspots almost half of all cases are of MDR-TB, said WHO.

"MDR-TB represents one of the most severe threats to public health today," said David Heymann, WHO communicable diseases chief. "Without proper treatment and surveillance it can easily become a global health emergency in years to come."

Taurel said Lilly will provide capreomycin and cycloserine, two antibiotics used to treat MDR-TB, "at a fraction of their cost" to a WHO program fighting MDR-TB in Russia, the Philippines, India, Peru and seven other countries. He said it represented US$25 million of the company's donation.

He noted that $14 million of the money will be used to provide firms in China, India and South Africa with the technology to make both antibiotics.

Patents for the drugs have expired, and the Chinese, Indian and South African firms will be able freely to sell them and set their own prices, Taurel added.

Most major WHO campaigns against TB and other diseases like AIDS and malaria involve alliances with private companies.