World Health Organisation sounds alarm over 'neglected' diseases

GENEVA - Around a billion people in the developing world are victims of so-called "neglected" diseases, horrific afflictions that disfigure their bodies and wreak huge economic damage, health officials say.

But because they are not out-and-out killers, like Aids, they do not receive the attention and international funding needed to tackle them effectively.

"They may not be major killers but they are responsible for terrible disabilities," said Maria Neira, director of the World Health Organisation's (WHO) department of communicable diseases.

While the world has pledged some US$2 billion (($4.69bn) to a global campaign to battle HIV-Aids, tuberculosis and malaria, just a fraction of this could help to make significant headway against such horrors as Buruli ulcer, elephantiasis, dengue fever and the main villain, intestinal parasites.

The diseases are rife in tropical parts of Africa and India.

Buruli ulcer, which is roaming unchecked across more than two dozen African countries, is caused by a bacterium that seems to have sprung right out of a Hollywood horror film.

It eats through skin, muscle and bone to leave gaping craters in its victims' bodies.

Other diseases such as leprosy, which the WHO is committed to eradicating by 2005, have attracted more attention, but even here funds are needed to ensure that the goal of freeing the world from a scourge known since Biblical times is achieved.

Neira said that the WHO was hoping to raise around US$100 million over the next five years -- significantly more than in recent years -- both to win the final battle against leprosy and take the war to some of the others.

"This is not a lot of money. But it would make a significant impact because for many of them (the diseases) we have very cheap forms of treatment," she said.

For example, lymphatic filariasis, more commonly known as elephantiasis, which affects more than 40 million people in Africa, India and across south Asia and the Americas, can be prevented by just taking two pills once a year.

It can lead to massive swelling of the limbs, genitals and breasts, turning victims into social outcasts unable to work.

Like the often fatal dengue fever, elephantiasis is transmitted by mosquitoes which thrive in areas of rapid and unplanned urban growth, officials say.

"If we do not control the diseases, if we do not give these people the health they need to work, it accentuates the vicious circle of poverty and disease," Neira said.

With governments focused on the headline-grabbing fight against HIV-Aids, the WHO has turned to private philanthropists, such as Bill Gates, chief of US software giant Microsoft, and the foundation of former US President Jimmy Carter for help.

For some diseases it is a matter of applying tried and tested treatments, but for others medical science is still floundering in the dark.

Nobody is sure where the bacterium that causes Buruli ulcers lives, how it enters the body and how it succeeds in disabling the immune system, preventing it from giving the normal warning signals for infection -- fever and pain.

"More than 50 per cent of the cases are in children under 15 years of age, and yet we know more about most veterinary diseases than we do about Buruli ulcer," said Kingsley Asiedu, responsible for the WHO's Buruli Ulcer Programme.

- REUTERS

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