Talking Points: The Scandal of 'Poor People's Diseases' by Tina Rosenberg - New York Times: "I. How a Beauty Regime Salvaged a Cure for Sleeping Sickness
The story of sleeping sickness is a scandalous illustration of the politics of neglected diseases — and of how much wealthy people drive the global medical market. After malaria, sleeping sickness is the most deadly parasitic disease. It is endemic in 36 African countries and is always fatal if it is not treated. The cure used in most places is melarsoprol – an arsenic-based drug so toxic that it collapses each vein into which it is injected and kills between two and eight percent of those who take it. There is another cure, eflornithine, so effective that it is called the 'resurrection drug' – it makes people in comas get up and walk.
Eflornithine is an old anticancer drug that turned out to be not very effective against cancer. In the mid-1990's, the company that made the drug stopped making it. The fact that it was extraordinarily effective at treating sleeping sickness didn't matter, because victims of that disease had little money to pay for it. After it stopped production, the company, which is now known as Sanofi-Aventis, licensed the drug to the World Health Organization, which together with the medical charity Doctors Without Borders, searched for another manufacturer. But by 2000, the existing stocks of eflornithine were dwindling and no other manufacturer was interested.It looked as though the miracle cure would disappear. Then lightening struck. Eflornithine reappeared in a six-page ad in Cosmopolitan magazine as the active ingredient in the Bristol- Myers Squibb product, Vaniqa, a new cream that impedes the growth of women's facial hair. Doctors Without Borders, which had just won the Nobel Peace Prize and was launching an initiative to find cures for neglected diseases, seized the opportunity to launch a publicity campaign. Christiane Amanpour went to southern Sudan "
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