Hope now rises worldwide for the treatment of killer diseases such as cancer, drug-resistance tuberculosis (TB), Hepatitis C, among others, as the World Health Organisation, On Friday listed and published new drugs for treating the diseases, according to a report in National Mirror.
Cancer, Hepatitis C and TB are among leading killer diseases globally, with cancer emerging deadliest and rapidly recording high prevalence.
according to the report, the drugs were approved at the meeting of the 20th Expert Committee on the Selection and Use of Essential Medicines which took place late last month at WHO Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.
A message released by the WHO and obtained by Mirror named the drugs for treating Hepatitis C to include Sofosbuvir, Daclatasvir, and direct acting oral antivirals.
“But high prices currently make them unaffordable and thus inaccessible to most people who need them,” the organisation lamented.
WHO noted that until recently, treatment for the disease presented minimal therapeutic benefits and serious side effects, but that the newly listed drugs had recently come on the market, transforming chronic hepatitis C from a barely manageable to a curable condition.
“When new effective medicines emerge to safely treat serious and widespread diseases, it is vital to ensure that everyone who needs them can obtain them,” WHO Director-General, Dr Margaret Chan, was quoted as saying in the statement.
She said further: “Placing them on the WHO Essential Medicines List is a first step in that direction.” Cancers, the release maintained, figure among the leading causes of illness and death worldwide, with approximately 14 million new cases and 8.2 million cancer-related deaths in 2012 alone.
“The number of new cases is expected to rise by about 70% over the next 2 decades. New breakthroughs have been made in cancer treatment in the last years, which prompted WHO to revise the full cancer segment of the Essential Medicines List this year: 52 products were reviewed and 30 treatments confirmed, with 16 new medicines included in the List,” according to WHO.
It said of Tuberculosis: “TB remains one of the world’s most deadly infectious diseases. In 2013, 9 million people fell ill with TB and 1.5 million died from the disease. Over 95% of TB deaths occur in lowand middle-income countries. After about 45 years of scarce innovation for TB medicines, 5 new products were included in the EML. Four of these, including bedaquiline and delamanid, target multi-drug-resistant TB.”
The organisation further explained that governments and institutions around the world use the WHO list to guide the development of their own essential medicines lists, “because they know that every medicine listed has been vetted for efficacy, safety and quality, and that there has been a comparative cost-effectiveness evaluation with other alternatives in the same class of medicines.”
