For the past few decades, measles has been in retreat, prompting some to campaign for its global elimination. But events in 2010 showed the ambitious slogans have come too early. An often lacklustre response to a surge of outbreaks in sub-Saharan Africa and insufficient funding means the disease is...
Promising news from the field of malaria research in 2010 shows that treating children suffering from severe malaria with injections of artesunate could save many more lives. Malaria kills around one million people every year, with nine in ten deaths being in young African children. Severe malaria...
Fake medicines, which make false claims about what they contain or where they are from, represent a genuine problem. But in 2010, a number of initiatives that claim to deal with this problem have gone off course, by taking a trade approach to what is first and foremost a public health problem. So...
The European Union is pursuing a free trade agreement with India which will restrict Indian drug producers from making affordable generic medicines used to treat people across the developing world. In October 2010, MSF launched a campaign called ‘Europe! Hands Off Our Medicines,’ with the goal of...
In 2010, international donors shifted their focus away from AIDS, threatening the advances that have been made in treating the disease over the last decade. New scientific evidence and treatment recommendations reinforce the need to provide people with better treatment and earlier during the...
In 2010, a particularly devastating “hunger season” in Niger threatened the lives of hundreds of thousands of young children. The effective humanitarian response demonstrated just how far strategies to tackle malnutrition have improved in recent years. Five years ago, new strategies were introduced...
In a move that could boost access to affordable medicines in the developing world, the Medicines Patent Pool was formally created in July 2010, and promptly received official backing from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) two months later. MSF has been actively campaigning for the creation...
A new test for tuberculosis that became available in 2010 will make diagnosing a curable disease that kills nearly two million people every year much faster, easier and more precise. At present, confirming that a person has TB usually involves a 130-year-old test to examine the phlegm patients...
A new, highly-effective vaccine launched in 2010 now offers the hope of an escape from one of the most fatal forms of meningitis in Africa – and it was developed not by one of the big pharmaceutical companies, but thanks to a partnership between the non-profit organisation PATH and the Serum...
Through its Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has been closely following the developments in the world of access to medicines, vaccines and diagnostics. Among the positive stories of the past year: new tools were developed for Meninigitis A and for...
