"International financial support aimed at counteracting the world's 'neglected diseases' increased by nearly a half-billion dollars over the past five years, according to new research released Monday, but changing funding dynamics could already be having a negative impact on the development of cures for diseases that affect a substantial proportion of the world's poor," Inter Press Service reports. "While funding for these diseases had begun to pick up, the new Global Funding of Innovation for Neglected Diseases (G-FINDER) report [.pdf] finds that this assistance has decreased again following the international financial crisis," the news service writes, adding, "More worrying, funding for research into these diseases remains highly dependent on a tiny number of players," including the U.S. (Biron, 12/3).

Writing in the Global Health Technologies Coalition's "Breakthroughs" blog, Eleonora Jimenez-Levi, a senior researcher at the Treatment Action Group (TAG), examines the 2012 Report on Tuberculosis Research Funding Trends: 2005–2011,"the latest report on the state of funding for tuberculosis (TB) research and product development." Jimenez-Levi recaps the findings and recommendations of the report and concludes, "Promising new tools are on the horizon, but without political will and adequate funding to support the development of new vaccines, diagnostics, and drugs, the world will not be able to contain the growing problem that drug-resistant TB poses, much less eliminate TB as a public health threat by 2050" (11/27).

The Wall Street Journal examines how "Greece has seen decades of advances in public health rolled back, as a flood of illegal immigrants, a dysfunctional government and budget cuts ravage a once proud health-care system." Noting "[o]ver the past two years, more than 50 endemic cases of [malaria] and more than 100 imported cases have been identified in Greece," the newspaper writes, "The return of malaria, a scourge in developing countries, to Greece is a disturbing indicator of the nation's decline since it crashed in 2009 under the weight of a debt binge." The Wall Street Journal examines the history of malaria's return to the country and how the government is responding. "In addition to malaria, public health officials say they are worried about rises in everything from infectious respiratory-tract diseases and skin conditions to tuberculosis and HIV," the newspaper notes (Granitsas, 11/14).

"A group of experts calling for a global treaty to stop the lethal trade in fake medicines has been barred from attending a World Health Organization meeting, highlighting deep divisions that are blocking progress on the subject," Reuters reports (Hirschler, 11/13). In an analysis published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) on Tuesday, Amir Attaran of the University of Ottawa and colleagues from the World Federation of Public Health Associations, International Pharmaceutical Federation, and the International Council of Nurses "urge the World Health Organization to set up a framework akin to its one [on] tobacco control to safeguard the public," BBC News writes. The experts "say while governments and drug companies alike deplore unsafe medicines, it is difficult to achieve agreement on action because discussions too often trespass into conflict-prone areas such as pharmaceutical pricing or intellectual property rights," the news service writes, adding, "Although some countries prohibit fake medicines under national law, there is no global treaty which means organized criminals can continue to trade using haven countries where laws are lax or absent" (Roberts, 11/13).

The November 2012 issue of USAID's "Global Health News" newsletter focuses on tuberculosis (TB). The newsletter features a link to a video titled "Voices of TB," an infographic (.pdf) on innovations in TB diagnostics, and links to an IMPACTblog piece and a USAID press release discussing TB diagnostics (November 2012).

At the XIX International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2012) on Thursday, PEPFAR and Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD), "announced Labs for Life, a new collaboration to help strengthen health care and laboratory systems in the developing world along with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)," a State Department fact sheet states (7/26). "The new five-year initiative builds on a previous five-year partnership between the U.S. government and [BD]" that "improved lab services in sub-Saharan African countries affected by HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, according to U.S. officials who had been briefed on an audit that will be released in a few weeks," CQ HealthBeat reports (Adams, 7/26).