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Student Editorials

The 90/10 divide

BMJ 2002; 325 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/sbmj.0208260 (Published 01 August 2002) Cite this as: BMJ 2002;325:0208260
  1. Nathan Ford, Access to Medicines adviser1
  1. 1Médecins Sans Frontières, London EC1R 5DJ

Ninety per cent of the world is at risk from infectious diseases, but only 10% of the world's research and pharmaceutical resources are spent on them. Drug development for diseases that affect poor people has come to a virtual standstill. Nathan Ford explains how Médecins Sans Frontières is trying to redress the balance with its ‘Access to Medicines’ campaign(also see the review of Secret Agents on p298)

Doctors confronting infectious disease in the less developed world are faced with impossible choices. Effective medicines exist to treat AIDS, but because patients in Africa cannot afford them doctors are left with little option but to tell them to go home and save up for their funeral.1

Patients with malaria are prescribed drugs that don't work because, although in some regions resistance to traditional medicines is over 90%,2 effective treatments are not available. The drug to treat sleeping sickness, melarsoprol, is an arsenic based medicine that kills one in 20 patients and doesn't work for one in three because of parasite resistance: the drug may kill the patient, but without treatment the patient will die anyway.3

MSF worker treating AIDS patient in Cameroon JUAN CARLOS THOMASI/MSF

Infectious diseases kill 14 million people each year, mostly in the less …

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