WIKIMEDIA, VCELLOHOWe at the Global Health Technologies Coalition (GHTC) have been inspired this year by a number of scientific breakthroughs designed to combat some of the greatest public health scourges across the globe. For the first time in 40 years, a new treatment was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (TB), second only to HIV/AIDS as the greatest infectious killer worldwide. In another landmark decision, the FDA also approved for the first time a drug (Truvada) that can be used to prevent HIV through a method known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, which targets high-risk individuals. The recent development of semisynthetic artemisinin to treat malaria means that scientists now have a new, stable source for the drug, whose supply has historically depended upon a volatile crop that only grows in a few places in the world. And just this week, groundbreaking research supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has found that a toddler in Mississippi was functionally cured of HIV.
These are just a few of the impressive array of other important discoveries that emerged this year. In fact, there has been a remarkable increase in the number of global health products developed in recent years, with 45 new tools registered between 2000 and 2010. In more than half of these cases, the work was supported by the US government. But the cuts that will come with this month’s mandatory sequestration, unless policymakers reverse the sequester and stop the full force of the budget slashes, and the potential for additional cuts down the line, mean that progress could come to a standstill while research projects sit on the shelf.
Sequestration will have widespread effects on funding levels for US global health and R&D programs, which ...
