Healthy Me - At Home and Away: Developing country

Showing posts with label Developing country. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

'TB sniffer' offers hope of early diagnosis

Posted: 08 November 2011

NEW DELHI: Indian researchers said on Monday they were close to developing an "electronic nose" to sniff out tuberculosis on the breath - offering rapid diagnosis that could save hundreds of thousands of lives.

The "E-Nose" is a battery-operated, hand-held unit, similar to a police breathalyser used to catch drunk drivers.

A patient blows into the device and sensors pick up TB biomarkers in the breath droplets, resulting in an almost instantaneous and highly accurate diagnosis.

The "E-Nose" is a collaboration between the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in New Delhi and Next Dimension Technologies in California.

"We hope to have a prototype ready for clinical testing by October 2013," said lead researcher Ranjan Nanda.

TB kills close to 1.7 million people globally every year, and researchers estimate the "E-Nose" could save 400,000 lives a year in developing countries through early diagnosis, treatment and reduced transmission.

TB is currently detected through sputum tests that are costly and take several days.

On Monday, the project was awarded a $950,000 grant by the Bill and Melinda gates Foundation and Grand Challenges Canada, a non-profit organisation working on health issues in the developing world.

"Our research shows it might also be possible to use this technology for the early detection of other diseases like lung cancer and pneumonia," Nanda told AFP.

Each "E-Nose" would cost roughly $20-30 and its size and battery operation would make it accessible to rural communities in countries such as India with poor or non-existent power supplies.

According to the World Health organisation, India leads the world in TB infections which kill close to 1,000 people every day.

"Our goal is to make the Electronic Nose widely available in poor, remote areas where tuberculosis often breeds and spreads, devastating so many lives," Nanda said.

Tuberculosis is a contagious bacterial infection that spreads through the air. If left untreated, each person with active TB will on average infect between 10 and 15 people every year, according to the WHO.

- AFP/de

Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
'TB sniffer' offers hope of early diagnosis

Sunday, September 4, 2011

WHO calls for ban on 'unreliable' TB blood tests

Posted: 21 July 2011

GENEVA: The World Health Organisation warned on Wednesday that millions of blood tests conducted every year to diagnose tuberculosis are unreliable and putting patients' lives in danger.

"Based on the evidence, (these) tests lead to misdiagnosis and mistreatment of patients. They are a waste of time and resources," Mario Raviglione, director of the WHO Stop TB Department, told reporters.

"We are calling on governments to ban the use of these tests."

An estimated two million such diagnostics, which look for antibodies or antigens in the blood, are used every year, and up to half of them could give false results, Karin Weyer, who works for the same department, said.

She warned that companies which continued to sell these diagnostic tools would be knowingly selling a faulty product.

"This is now a matter of public record," she said, adding however that the WHO did not know how many deaths resulted from these unreliable tests, which started being released in the 1990s.

They are mostly manufactured by companies based in the developed world, including Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the United States, but also in emerging giants China and India.

A list of companies pinpointed by the WHO includes US-based Mossman Associates, French group Anda Biologicals and British firm Omega Diagnostics.

"They cost the poor and vulnerable $10 to $30. And yet more often than not, the results are wrong," Raviglione said.

Other types of diagnostics, which cost between $16 and $28 give more reliable results, Raviglione said.

One of the reasons these tests are in the market is because of lack of regulations, Weyer explained.

"It's a multi-million dollar business centred on selling substandard tests with unreliable results.

"The market for these products is not in Europe or the US, but in developing countries.

"These companies just ship (the tests) to developing countries with weak or no regulatory framework," concluded Weyer.

According to the WHO website, there are some 9.4 million new cases of active TB and 1.7 million people who are killed by the transmissible disease every year.

- AFP/al

Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
WHO calls for ban on 'unreliable' TB blood tests

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

World health agency challenges mental health neglect

GENEVA - World Health Organisation chief Margaret Chan on Thursday vowed to "change the landscape" for mental health, saying neglect is leaving millions of poor people without care.

About 75 per cent of sufferers in poor and middle income countries are thought to be left untreated, a problem fuelled by a lack of knowledge among ordinary doctors and nurses, health experts said.

Adding to the problem is social stigma, neglect, lack of funding, and an increasingly challenged rich country focus on psychiatric institutions.

"One in four people are affected by mental, neurological disorders or substance abuse in their lifetime," said WHO Assistant Director General Ala Alwan.

The WHO estimates that 150 million people suffer from depression - 95 million of them in developing nations - 40 million from epilepsy, 20 million from dementia or Alzheimer's disease among a host of mental or neurological disorders.

"Efforts to close the mental health gap have been impeded by a widespead assumption that improvements in mental health require sophisticated and expensive technologies, delivered in highly specialised settings by highly specialised staff," said WHO Director General Chan.

"We face a misplaced perception that mental health intervention is a luxury," she added pledging to challenge that attitude.

While high profile diseases grab attention, mental and neurological disorders are "swept under the carpet and brushed aside" even though they form 14 per cent of the global disease burden, said Chan.

A cornerstone of the drive is a new guide for ordinary doctors and nurses in developing and emerging countries to ease diagnosis and proper treatment of mental and neurological disorders, as well as drug and alcohol abuse.

Chan said it could "change the landscape for mental health."

Drawn up by 200 specialists from around the world, the guide places the emphasis on primary care, leading general doctors methodically through each stage from identifying symptoms of disorders such as depression and epilepsy to treatment or care.

But the experts discovered that 99 per cent of the knowledge came from rich nations, and faced substantial work in adapting it to developing countries, said one of the authors, Graham Thornicroft of the Institute of Psychiatry in London.

The guide covers depression, psychosis, bipolar disorders, seizures, behavioural and developmental disorders, dementia, alcohol problems, drug addiction and suicide.

Its guidance take into account the needs of different genders as well as age - for example by avoiding drug treatment for children suffering from symptoms of depression.

"The programme will lead to nurses in Ethiopia recognising people suffering with depression in their day to day work and providing psychosocial assistance," said WHO mental health director Shekhar Saxena.

"Similarly, doctors in Jordan and medical assistants in Nigeria will be able to treat children with epilepsy."

"Both these conditions are commonly encountered in primary care, but neither identified nor treated due to lack of knowledge and skills of the health care providers," he explained.

Saxena insisted that the experts had steered clear of any commercial influence on their guidance.

"It's very easy to fall into the trap of recommending medicines," he added.

- AFP/al

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:World health agency challenges mental health neglect
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Friday, May 22, 2009

'Subtle, sneaky'; swine flu could hit poor nations: WHO

Time is GMT + 8 hours
Posted: 23-May-2009 05:58 hrs

Dressed in hazardous materials suits, members of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals march to the US Embassy in Manila. Global health chiefs have warned swine flu could soon hit much harder in the world's poorest countries and its spread in Asia was in danger of accelerating with the change of season.

A WHO specialist pointed out on Thursday that most developing countries were simply not in a position to detect or track seasonal flu, let alone a potentially pandemic strain of swine flu.

But the UN health agency is helping poor countries to develop simplified means of detecting flu, such as by spotting clusters of unusual respiratory illness, a spokesman told AFP.

From TODAYOnline.com; see the source article here.

H1N1 flu vaccine could be ready end June, says WHO

Posted: 23 May 2009 0333 hrs

GENEVA - The World Health Organisation (WHO) said Friday it was hopeful that the pharmaceutical industry would be ready to produce an anti-H1N1 flu vaccine by the end of June or early July.

"We're hopeful that by the end of June by the beginning July this will be the time that commercial companies will be in a position of being able to make a vaccine," said interim Assistant Director General Keiji Fukuda.

However, Fukuda said experts were still mulling whether to give the go ahead for production as this may reduce or halt the manufacture of vaccines for seasonal flu.

"We will hold off on making this decision for a little while," he added.

Production of up to 4.9 billion doses a year of a vaccine against the new influenza A(H1N1) virus would be possible, according to a forecast presented to vaccine makers this week.

Apart from weighing the impact of the new virus against that of seasonal flu, issues like dosage and safety testing also have to be settled.

"There will need to be fast tracking of some of these studies," Fukuda said.
The WHO hopes to send candidate virus samples to drug companies by the end of this month to serve as a reference in making the vaccine.

Thirty vaccine makers from 19 industralised and developing countries were invited by the WHO to a meeting on Tuesday to discuss production of a vaccine against H1N1 flu.

A key issue for the meeting was the cost of the vaccine and its availability in the most vulnerable and poor countries.

The WHO is seeking funding from the World Bank and international health funds or foundations to help finance vaccine supply in such nations.

Fukuda underlined that a vaccine was one of the key steps to ward off a potential H1N1 flu pandemic as the new virus spreads around the world, despite its relatively mild symptoms for now in most cases.

Meanwhile, head of the WHO Margaret Chan had warned that the "sneaky" H1N1 flu virus could spread in developing nations.

"This is a subtle, sneaky virus, it does not announce its presence or arrival in a new country with sudden explosion of patients seeking medical care or requiring hospitalisation," said Chan.

She warned that "countries especially in the developing world, where populations are most vulnerable, should prepare to see more than the present small number of severe cases."

The spread in impoverished nations was one of the signals that the WHO was keeping an eye on before it declares a pandemic, instead of simply relying on geographical spread under its influenza rulebook.

The WHO's latest figures put the overall number of infections worldwide at more than 11,100, including 86 deaths.

- AFP /ls

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.