New projects aim to better identify critically ill children
Geneva – ALIMA, PATH and Unitaid today announced a US$ 43 million initiative to put affordable, easy-to-use diagnostic devices into the hands of frontline health workers in Asia and Africa to help better identify critically ill children and refer them for treatment without delay.
The projects will focus on technologies that simultaneously address multiple diseases—including pneumonia, diarrhea and malaria—aligning with UN Sustainable Development Goals’ push for integrated approaches to global health.
The projects will span nine countries. PATH’s US$ 28.4 million grant runs through 2023, and ALIMA’s US$ 14.9 million grant through 2022.
“Too many children are dying each day because their medical condition goes undetected,” ALIMA Executive Director Augustin Augier said. “ALIMA is proud to work with Unitaid to bring devices that are critical to improving health services and identifying children at risk, with the greatest needs in West Africa.”
Frontline health workers in low-income countries often lack essential tools to assess which children urgently need hospital referral. Danger signs are often overlooked or not adequately treated. The lack of quick, accurate diagnostics sometimes leads to the misuse of malaria medicines and antibiotics, which in turn causes antimicrobial resistance and preventable deaths.
In 2017, an estimated 5.4 million children died before their fifth birthday, most of them from diseases that can be prevented and treated.
“A successful project will empower primary health care workers with tools that improve their ability to identify and treat a range of severe diseases impacting a given community,” PATH CEO Steve Davis said. “This cross-cutting approach is an important step towards more integrated health systems.”
Devices that measure multiple vital signs, such as oxygen saturation in the blood and respiratory rate, are essential for alerting primary health workers to signs of severe disease, regardless of the cause. But existing devices are not adapted to the needs of low-income countries, and little guidance is available on how to use them at the primary health care level.
The PATH and ALIMA projects will pilot easy-to-use devices known as pulse oximeters that measure the amount of oxygen in the blood. Low oxygen saturation indicates that a child is very ill and must be urgently referred to a hospital.
The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends the use of pulse oximeters at the primary health care level, but they are rarely used. The projects with PATH and ALIMA will generate important data—on feasibility, cost-effectiveness and impact—to help these devices be widely adopted by countries and funding partners.
“We need more of these integrated approaches to continue advancing universal health coverage, to confront antimicrobial resistance, and to make health systems a lot more efficient,” Unitaid Executive Director Lelio Marmora said.
PATH will work with the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH) in India, Kenya, Myanmar, Senegal and Tanzania, while ALIMA will team up with Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM), Solthis and Terre des Hommes in Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali and Niger.
PATH’s project will also evaluate new handheld devices that can detect multiple vital signs, such as respiratory rate, hemoglobin and temperature.
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For more information: Carol MASCIOLA, masciolac@unitaid.who.int
Unitaid’s Board welcomes new leadership and acknowledges strong achievements
Seoul – The Unitaid Executive Board elected a new leadership, reflected on its midterm strategy review and discussed ways to increase impact until the end of its strategy in 2021 and beyond.
The Board’s 32nd meeting opened with remarks from Korean Vice-Minister Kim Ganglip of the Ministry of Health and Welfare and Deputy Minister for Multilateral and Global Affairs Kang Jeong-sik of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The Board thanked the outgoing Board Chair Ambassador Marta Maurás Pérez and Vice-Chair Ms. Sarah Boulton for their strategic guidance over the past years and elected its new leadership. The new Chair Ms. Marisol Touraine, former French Minister of Social Affairs, Health and Women’s Rights will lead Unitaid’s Board through an exciting new period. “The key to Unitaid’s future lies in facing up to new challenges in global health, with confidence in our capacity to rally partners around shared goals,” said Ms. Touraine. The Board also welcomed Ambassador Maria Louisa Escorel De Moraes as its new Vice-Chair. Ambassador Escorel is the Deputy Permanent Representative of Brazil to the UN and other international organizations in Geneva.
Adopting the midterm review of Unitaid’s 2017-2021 strategy, the board acknowledged that Unitaid is on track towards its mission to maximize the effectiveness of the global health response by catalyzing equitable access to better health products. The review confirmed that Unitaid’s investments support highly innovative health products such as medicines and diagnostic tools, which can save lives of millions of people and create greater impact for the global health response.
“Unitaid’s portfolio is robust and well aligned to global health priorities. Unitaid focuses on bringing highly effective innovations to those in need, which is critical to accelerate progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals,” Executive Director Lelio Marmora said.
The next Board meeting will take place in Geneva on 20-21 November.
Read the Executive Board’s Resolutions and Minutes
Read the Executive Board’s e-Resolutions
UNICEF and Unitaid join forces to improve the health of children, adolescents and mothers
Geneva – Unitaid and UNICEF will collaborate to save the lives of more children, adolescents and mothers, an agreement formalized by a memorandum of understanding signed today.
With decades of experience fighting the biggest diseases threatening children under five, adolescent girls and young women, the newly signed memorandum will align the complementary efforts of the organizations to end malaria, pneumonia, HIV, tuberculosis and cervical cancer, to expand access to innovative point-of-care diagnostics, and to improve fever management in children.
“Unitaid and UNICEF have worked together on a number of lifesaving projects. Formalizing our collaboration will make our response stronger, faster and more effective,” Unitaid Executive Director Lelio Marmora said.
Marmora and Fore signed the agreement.
“Partnership and innovation have been the hallmark of the UNICEF-Unitaid partnership over many years. This new memorandum builds on this legacy, bringing together our resources, expertise and products to improve health outcomes in the communities–and for the children–who need it most,” UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta H. Fore said.
By teaming up in the fight against major disease killers in children, adolescents and mothers, Unitaid and UNICEF will work towards the Sustainable Development Goals and universal health coverage for a better tomorrow.
WHO’s Dr. Tedros says Unitaid’s work giving boost to global health system
Geneva – World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus today stressed the critical importance of innovation in reaching the Sustainable Development Goals for global health and said Unitaid’s work holds “the potential to transform the health of individuals, families, communities and nations.”
“The fact is, that human health has only ever progressed because of innovation. Penicillin. Anesthesia. Germ theory. Sanitation. Mapping the human genome,” Dr. Tedros said, speaking Tuesday at the opening of Unitaid’s 2019 Grant Implementers’ Forum.
Dr. Tedros addressed Unitaid’s secretariat and an audience of global health experts, agenda leaders and 100-plus strategic and operational staff engaged in Unitaid’s 42 active grants.
“The entire health system benefits from the projects you fund and the price reductions you negotiate,” Dr. Tedros said.
He cited Unitaid’s “unique strength to constantly adapt to changing global health needs” and called for stronger alignment between WHO and Unitaid to ensure that health innovations don’t “get stuck on the path to scale and sustainability.”
WHO has a special role to play, he said, in securing large-scale introduction of health innovations.
“Our global mandate and global presence mean we are uniquely placed to be the world’s scaler of innovations,” Dr. Tedros said. “We can help match the supply of evidence-based innovations with the demand from countries. We recognize this is a role we need to play much more actively than we have in the past.”
Tedros endorsed Unitaid’s new work against Plasmodium vivax malaria, as well as the organization’s efforts to apply long-acting technologies to the fight against HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, and hepatitis C in lower-income countries.
The forum runs through Wednesday, with a focus on “scalability”—the expansion of proven innovations to all those who need them.
Unitaid seeks innovative, long-lasting technologies to help tackle diseases
Geneva – Unitaid is pleased to announce a call for proposals for projects speeding development of long-acting versions of medicines that could potentially revolutionize treatment and prevention of diseases including HIV, tuberculosis and malaria in low- and middle-income countries.
Safe and effective daily oral medicines are available for the prevention and treatment of major diseases, but they are not always taken consistently, resulting in worse health outcomes, the spread of illness and the development of drug-resistant superbugs.
Long-acting treatments include slow-release injectables, implants, patches or rings that can last more than a month, and oral medicines that can last more than a week. Delivering medicines this way frees patients from complex, daily regimens with many pills, and could also improve access and address stigma.
Unitaid is soliciting proposals that:
• Reformulate critical standard-of-care medicines into long-acting products.
• Enable sound plans to commercialize these products, including a scale-up strategy to introduce them on a large scale.
• Focus on products that can be introduced in the market within three to five years.
Through calls for proposals, Unitaid finds smart new ideas to help alleviate the burden of diseases, and conducts pilots that, if successful, are scaled up by partner organizations such as the Global Fund. An independent review committee of global health experts helps Unitaid choose the best proposals to fund through a competitive selection process.
Unitaid extends support to WHO prequalification programme
Geneva – Unitaid is investing a further $22.1 million in the World Health Organization´s (WHO) prequalification programme for medicines and diagnostics.
Unitaid has supported the prequalification programme for medicines since 2006, and for diagnostics since 2009. With the new investment, Unitaid´s support to the programme now stands at about US$ 157 million.
‘WHO is grateful for Unitaid’s support to our prequalification programme,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “It has been critical in ensuring that the health products reaching millions of patients across the world are of good quality, safe and effective.”
The new grant, for 2019-2021, supports some aspects of prequalification of medicines and in vitro diagnostics, and the WHO collaborative procedure for registration.
WHO prequalification is an internationally recognized process that enables medicines and other health products to be procured and distributed by international funding bodies such as the Global Fund.
WHO, Unitaid and the Global Fund are among the 12 organizations that have united to accelerate progress towards the health-related SDGs through a shared Global Action Plan for Healthy Lives and Well-being for All.
