Nearly 2,500 years ago, Hippocrates noted that tuberculosis was the most widespread disease of his time. The prevalence of TB has not changed much since then, said Victor Roy (WCAS ‘07), a first-year medical student at the Feinberg School of Medicine, at a presentation Friday.
The Buffett Center for Comparative and International Studies, 1902 Sheridan Road, hosted Roy, who shared his research work on “Social Strategy for Global Health Equity.” Roy is a founding and current board member for GlobeMed, a non-profit that engages undergraduates at 33 universities across the U.S., including Northwestern, to advance a movement for global health equity. During his talk, Roy gave his audience an overview of how the landscape for battling TB has changed over the years.
TB is an airborne disease that primarily attacks the lungs and takes nearly 2 million lives and infects 9 million people each year, particularly in Africa and Southeast Asia. Roy’s discussion focused on multidrug-resistant TB, which requires second- and third-line drugs that cost an average of $17,000 per year per person, according to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center website.
Prior to the mid-’90s, the World Health Organization and the World Bank were the primary organizations that shaped international TB policy. The WHO had started a cost-effective initiative, DOTS, which treated basic TB with first-line drugs.
Roy said the issue of multidrug-resistant TB was still being ignored and the exorbitant prices of second- and third-line drugs led to WHO’s appeal to individual countries to allocate funds only for treating basic TB.
In response to the lack of services for patients of multidrug-resistant TB, Partners in Health, a Boston-based non-profit focusing on health care, started a specialized treatment program in Peru. The program cured 85 percent of its patients, Roy said.
“The field had changed,” he said.
In the wake of PIH’s initiative, the WHO launched the DOTS-Plus program and organized the Green Light Committee that worked to persuade pharmaceutical companies to reduce drug prices by promising them a larger market in exchange for cheaper drugs, Roy said.
Despite such policy reforms, only 25,000 out of the 5 million total MDR-TB patients are receiving adequate treatment, Roy said. The low proportion was potentially due to a lack of community-based work in the developing world, he said.
“The approach needs to be less technocratic and less centralized,” Roy said.
Roy ended his presentation with a quote by Yale professor Haun Saussy.
“‘Once something can be done, then that raises the ethical obligation that you should do it,'” he said.
