Posted on 4 November, 2011
What it costs to help prevent the transmission of HIV to newborns and infants
• It costs roughly US$150 per year for the medicines for a pregnant woman for her own health, although much less if she needs a short-course for prevention. It costs around $40 to provide the antiretroviral medicine needed as prophylaxis for a child for one year.
• With access to antiretroviral medicines and appropriate health care, more than 98 percent of pregnant women with HIV do not pass the virus on to their babies.
• An estimated 370,000 children were newly infected with HIV in 2009, the vast majority of them through mother-to-child transmission. Half of those are likely to die without HIV medication before they are two years old.
“5 Lives” tells the stories of people who MSF works with every day, people whose lives often hinge on whether or not they can gain access to a simple medical intervention. These are situations that could be avoided with proper and sustainable funding and investment in public health. That’s why MSF supports calls to permanently allocate a small portion of a new financial transaction tax (FTT), which has been proposed by some governments, to support global health needs. A regular stream of funding would help provide some of the resources needed to address unchecked health crises around the world.
What it costs to save more lives and help prevent transmission of HIV
• It costs roughly US$150 for the HIV medicines to treat a person for one year.
• UNAIDS estimates that by dramatically expanding treatment now, seven million deaths and more than 12 million new infections can be averted by 2020. This would require an additional $6 billion each year.
• The funding shortfall: Donors are radically scaling back on funding global HIV/AIDS. The main funder of global HIV programmes, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, for the first time in its ten-year history has had to skip a year of approving new proposals because of lack of funding. It needs an estimated US$4.5 billion over the next two years to fund new proposals, but only has $800 million.
“5 Lives” tells the stories of people who MSF works with every day, people whose lives often hinge on whether or not they can gain access to a simple medical intervention. These are situations that could be avoided with proper and sustainable funding and investment in public health. That’s why MSF supports calls to permanently allocate a small portion of a new financial transaction tax (FTT), which has been proposed by some governments, to support global health needs. A regular stream of funding would help provide some of the resources needed to address unchecked health crises around the world.
At 21 years old Phumeza should have her whole life to look forward to. Right now she’s confined to a bed in a tuberculosis (TB) care centre in Khayelitsha near Cape Town, South Africa on treatment for the most virulent form of TB currently known – extensively drug-resistant TB, or XDR-TB.
Phumeza doesn’t know how she contracted TB. She thinks it could have been on a crowded bus or at school. She knows she felt ill and that no-one could tell her what was
wrong. So began a long and painful journey of misdiagnosis and waiting while she just got sicker and sicker.
“At first, they gave me aspirins and paracetamol,“ Phumeza said. “They didn’t see any TB on the smear they took. I had so many different tests but they still couldn’t see what was
wrong! I just got more sick.”
Finally, nearly two months later Phumeza was diagnosed in hospital with MDR-TB (multidrug-resistant TB) by which time she was so ill she was forced to drop out of school.
“Sometimes I didn’t know whether I was coming or going,” she said.
Last year for the first time in ten years, the number of people dying from TB worldwide dropped, but still every year we miss diagnosing and treating around three million cases of TB. And half of those people die as a result of not being treated. So many people with this curable disease fall through the net because, until recently, the tests to confirm that someone has active TB or not have been so completely inadequate.
Now, a new test using molecular technology is clearing the path for getting many more people on the treatment they need earlier. It’s still only a start – too many patients will still be kept waiting for a diagnosis so they can get the treatment they need but some first steps have at least been taken to improve TB diagnostics.
"5 Lives” tells the stories of people who MSF works with every day, people whose lives often hinge on whether or not they can gain access to a simple medical intervention. These are situations that could be avoided with proper and sustainable funding and investment in public health. That’s why MSF supports calls to permanently allocate a small portion of a new financial transaction tax (FTT), which has been proposed by some governments, to support global health needs. A regular stream of funding would help provide some of the resources needed to address unchecked health crises around the world.
Photo: © Samantha Reinder
What it costs to diagnose and cut the time to life-saving tuberculosis treatment
• One test cartridge of the new test costs at best US$17 and each machine is priced at $17,000 in developing countries. Those costs are still very high for developing countries and efforts must be made to reduce them and come up with a test that is equally well performing but cheaper.
• Treatment for drug-resistant TB can be up to almost $9,000 - nearly 475 times more than a $19 treatment course for drug-sensitive TB.
• The funding shortfall: WHO estimates that for 2012 there is US$1.5 billion shortfall to
prevent, test, and treat TB properly, $1 billion is needed for R&D for better tools including the development of a rapid and more affordable point-of-care TB test and new and better drugs.
“5 Lives” tells the stories of people who MSF works with every day, people whose lives often hinge on whether or not they can gain access to a simple medical intervention. These are situations that could be avoided with proper and sustainable funding and investment in public health. That’s why MSF supports calls to permanently allocate a small portion of a new financial transaction tax (FTT), which has been proposed by some governments, to support global health needs. A regular stream of funding would help provide some of the resources needed to address unchecked health crises around the world.
“First off, I couldn’t breathe because of the smell then second..there’s people washing in a river absolutely polluted with garbage, dead animals, dead fruit, drinking it, bathing in it, swimming in it, I mean that in itself has to be unsafe, unsanitary.” - Stanley Greene
14.8 million people are currently living in Dhaka. The city’s population has doubled in the last 20 years. The growth of industries like jute and garment manufacturing continues to draw ever more Bangladeshis into the city. The poorest slum inhabitants run a high risk of contracting communicable diseases due to overcrowding, unsanitary and substandard housing, and lack of access to quality health care. There are now more than 5,000 slum areas in Dhaka and development of infrastructure and health facilities is struggling to keep pace.
Urban Survivors is a multimedia project by Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in collaboration with the NOOR photo agency and Darjeeling Productions, highlighting the critical humanitarian and medical needs that exist in slums the world over.
Urban Survivors take the visitor on a virtual journey through five slums- in Dhaka, Johannesburg, Karachi, Nairobi and Port-au-Prince- where MSF is running projects. The website lets the visitor discover more about the daily lives of people in these slums, the challenges they face, and what MSF is doing to address their humanitarian needs.
Urban Survivors features photo material by renowned, award-winning NOOR photographers Stanley Greene, Alixandra Fazzina, Francesco Zizola, Jon Lowenstein and Pep Bonet.
Photo: © Stanley Greene/Noor
When you look at urban survival in a place like Bangladesh, it takes on another connotation and when you try to understand how people can live in houses built of sticks in swamps and garbage, I mean and try to survive without getting sick, or living life until death, it all seems very difficult.
Urban Survivors is a multimedia project by Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in collaboration with the NOOR photo agency and Darjeeling Productions, highlighting the critical humanitarian and medical needs that exist in slums the world over.