India should tax air tickets to pay for AIDS drugs - U.N.

NEW DELHI, June 5 (AlertNet) - Millions of the world's poorest people could have easier access to life-saving drugs if India introduces an air ticket tax to help fund purchases of cheap medicines for HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, a senior U.N. official said.

UNITAID, a U.N. agency which negotiates for cheap medicines from pharmaceutical manufacturers to treat deadly diseases, is lobbying countries such as India to join its air ticket levy initiative which began in 2006.

Under the program, countries put a nominal amount on the cost of air tickets which funds UNITAID to buy drugs for patients in the developing world. Ten countries have imposed the levy, generating $200 million annually for cheap medicine.

"What we want in India is a similar system by which a very small contribution which is painless to the traveler can be applied to large numbers of travelers," UNITAID Executive Director Denis Broun told AlertNet in an interview.

"Since air traffic is very high in India, the small amount of levy makes a huge difference to the amount of drugs that we can purchase and the number of poor who can benefit from them."

HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis kill 4.4 million people each year, UNITAID says. Approximately 14.2 million people are in need of anti-retroviral drugs globally, yet more than half cannot afford them.

India's airlines are reeling under a debt load of $20 billion and lost $2 billion last year, as high fuel prices, a weakening rupee and competition kept fares low and costs high.

But the country boasts the fastest growing air passenger market of major economies with 61 million people traveling last year, and still growing.

"People are saying I am coming at the wrongest possible moment. You hear all these arguments, but they are absolutely bogus. It has no impact on government budgets, airline traffic or the economy."

WIN-WIN FOR INDIA

Broun, who met civil aviation and health officials, said he was proposing a tax of 10 rupees (18 U.S. cents) on domestic tickets and $1 on international flights. He said discussions were at a very early stage.

Chile charges $1 per ticket as their levy, while Brazil charges $2 for international flights, he said. French passengers pay one euro for domestic and four euros for international tickets.

Mali, Mauritius, Madagascar, Cameroon, Congo, Niger and South Korea had also implemented air-ticket levies, said Broun.

He said it was a win-win situation for India as 80 percent of the drugs bought by UNITAID are from Indian pharmaceutical firms and some of which were for Indian patients.

"It would be a good thing for India. First of all, Indian patients benefit - 35,000 Indian children are treated for HIV using drugs paid for by UNITAID," he said.

"We buy most of our drugs from India so in a sense what would the tax do? It would go back into the Indian economy into the pharmaceutical sector. So it's difficult to find arguments to say it would be bad."

(AlertNet is a humanitarian news service run by Thomson Reuters Foundation. Visit http://www.trust.org/alertnet)

(Additional reporting by Anurag Kotoky; Editing by Robert Birsel)

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Sex bug growing resistant to drugs, WHO warns

GENEVA (AP) — A potentially dangerous sexually transmitted disease that infects millions of people each year is growing resistant to drugs and could soon become untreatable, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.

The U.N. health agency is urging governments and doctors to step up surveillance of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, a bacterial infection that can cause inflammation, infertility, pregnancy complications and, in extreme cases, lead to maternal death. Babies born to mothers with gonorrhea have a 50 percent chance of developing eye infections that can result in blindness.

"This organism has basically been developing resistance against every medication we've thrown at it," said Dr. Manjula Lusti-Narasimhan, a scientist in the agency's department of sexually transmitted diseases. This includes a group of antibiotics called cephalosporins currently considered the last line of treatment.

"In a couple of years it will have become resistant to every treatment option we have available now," she told The Associated Press in an interview ahead of WHO's public announcement on its 'global action plan' to combat the disease.

Lusti-Narasimhan said the new guidance is aimed at ending complacency about gonorrhea and encouraging researchers to speed up their hunt for a new cure.

Once considered a scourge of sailors and soldiers, gonorrhea — known colloquially as the clap — became easily treatable with the discovery of penicillin. Now, it is again the second most common sexually transmitted infection after chlamydia. The global health body estimates that of the 498 million new cases of curable sexually transmitted infections worldwide, gonorrhea is responsible for some 106 million infections annually. It also increases the chances of infection with other diseases, such as HIV.

"It's not a European problem or an African problem, it's really a worldwide problem," said Lusti-Narasimhan.

Scientists believe overuse or incorrect use of antibiotics, coupled with the gonorrhea bacteria's astonishing ability to adapt, means the disease is now close to becoming a super bug.

Bacteria that survive antibiotic treatment due to a mutation that makes them resistant then quickly spread their genes in an accelerated process of natural selection. This is a general problem affecting all antibiotics, but gonorrhea is particularly quick to adapt, said Lusti-Narasimhan.

"If it didn't do so much damage it would actually be a fun organism to study," she said.

Resistance to cephalosporins was first reported in Japan, but more recently has also been detected in Britain, Australia, France, Sweden and Norway. As these are all countries with well-developed health systems, it is likely that cephalosporin-resistant strains are also circulating undetected elsewhere.

Therefore the Geneva-based agency wants countries not just to tighten their rules for antibiotic use, but also to improve their surveillance systems so that the full extent of the problem can be determined.

Better sex education is also needed, as proper condom use is an effective means of stopping transmission, said Lusti-Narasimhan.

"We're not going to be able to get rid of it completely," she said. "But we can limit the spread."

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Gonorrhea growing resistant to drugs, WHO warns

GENEVA (AP) — A sexually transmitted disease that infects millions of people each year is growing resistant to drugs and could soon become untreatable, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.

The U.N. health agency is urging governments and doctors to step up surveillance of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, a bacterial infection that can cause inflammation, infertility, pregnancy complications and, in extreme cases, lead to maternal death. Babies born to mothers with gonorrhea have a 50 percent chance of developing eye infections that can result in blindness.

"This organism has basically been developing resistance against every medication we've thrown at it," said Dr. Manjula Lusti-Narasimhan, a scientist in the agency's department of sexually transmitted diseases. This includes a group of antibiotics called cephalosporins currently considered the last line of treatment.

"In a couple of years it will have become resistant to every treatment option we have available now," she told The Associated Press in an interview ahead of WHO's public announcement on its 'global action plan' to combat the disease.

Lusti-Narasimhan said the new guidance is aimed at ending complacency about gonorrhea and encouraging researchers to speed up their hunt for a new cure.

Once considered a scourge of sailors and soldiers, gonorrhea — known colloquially as the clap — became easily treatable with the discovery of penicillin. Now, it is the second most common sexually transmitted infection after chlamydia. The global health body estimates that gonorrhea is responsible for some 106 million infections annually. It also increases the chances of infection with other diseases, such as HIV.

"It's not a European problem or an African problem, it's really a worldwide problem," said Lusti-Narasimhan.

Scientists believe overuse or incorrect use of antibiotics, coupled with the gonorrhea bacteria's astonishing ability to adapt, means the disease is now close to becoming a super bug.

Bacteria that survive antibiotic treatment due to a mutation that makes them resistant then quickly spread their genes in an accelerated process of natural selection. This is a general problem affecting all antibiotics, but gonorrhea is particularly quick to adapt because it is good at picking up snippets of DNA from other bacteria, said Lusti-Narasimhan.

"If it didn't do so much damage it would actually be a fun organism to study," she said.

Resistance to cephalosporins was first reported in Japan, but more recently has also been detected in Britain, Australia, France, Sweden and Norway. As these are all countries with well-developed health systems, it is likely that cephalosporin-resistant strains are also circulating undetected elsewhere.

"I think this is probably only the tip of the iceberg," said Prof. Catherine Ison, who oversees the national surveillance program for treatment of resistant gonorrhea in England and Wales.

The over-the-counter availability of low potency antibiotics in some Asian countries is one of the reasons why resistance is increasing, she said.

Doctors in Britain are now switching to using a combination of antibiotics over a longer period of time to combat resistant gonorrhea, said Ison, who is based at the UK's Health Protection Agency.

The Geneva-based WHO wants countries not just to tighten their rules for antibiotic use but also to improve their surveillance systems so that the full extent of the problem can be determined.

Better sex education is also needed, as proper condom use is an effective means of stopping transmission, said Lusti-Narasimhan.

"We're not going to be able to get rid of it completely," she said. "But we can limit the spread."

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