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 Late and slow international response, the absence of solid
leadership as well as the lack of treatments and vaccines are a
recurrent scenario in many of today's health emergencies and are not
unique to the Ebola epidemic, the medical charity said.
"If a global pandemic were to strike tomorrow, there is still no
well-resourced, coordinated international response in place to kick
in," Joanne Liu, the international president of Médecins Sans
Frontières (MSF), said in a statement on Wednesday.
The Ebola epidemic was detected in Guinea more than a year ago, and
spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone, killing more than 11,000 people.
While Liberia was recently declared Ebola-free, a spike in new cases
in Guinea has stoked concerns the virus could spread again.
To avert the risk of losing thousands more lives to a new health
emergency, Liu urged the leaders of an upcoming G7 meeting to take
action to close the "gaping hole in our global health system".
World leaders from Germany, the United States, Britain, France,
Canada, Italy and Japan will meet in Germany next week, and are
expected to discuss Ebola and neglected diseases, among other
issues, MSF said.
It said too little funding goes into the development of new drugs
and vaccines for neglected diseases, or those that have proven
resistant to available treatments.
Moreover, many of these medicines are priced out of reach, the
charity said.
"Millions of people suffer from diseases for which there are no
effective drugs or vaccines, because they don't represent a
lucrative market for the pharmaceutical industry," said MSF's
Philipp Frisch.
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Drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) is one of the health emergencies
for which new drugs, vaccines and diagnostics are urgently needed,
according to MSF.
The organization said it treats thousands of people each year for
drug-resistant TB while managing to cure only one in two, and some
forms of the disease are no longer treatable due to resistance to
existing drugs.
"Wealthy, developed countries must take urgent action against the
market failure in the pharmaceutical research and development,"
Frisch said.
(Reporting by Maria Caspani, Editing by Alisa Tang.; Please credit
Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters,
that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, corruption and
climate change. Visit www.trust.org)
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