Nature: Projects set to tackle neglected diseases
“…Pharmaceutical companies say that poor customers cannot afford to pay the high prices needed to recoup development costs. Critics say that eight proposals, endorsed last month by reviewers for the World Health Organization (WHO) to break the stalemate for [kala-azar] and other neglected diseases, are noble, but no solution. The measures will do little, they say, to solve a broader problem: the disparity in spending on research and development for diseases of the rich and those of the poor. … The projects are part of an attempt to salvage a decade-long effort to create new funding mechanisms for neglected diseases. … But critics worry that the eight shortlisted pilot projects are not actually testing new ways of funding, and that more innovative ones have been shelved…” (Hayden, 1/7).