An NGO-government partnership in the
Philippines has improved access to treatment for pediatric cancer, a leading
cause of death in children aged 1-14, according to the Department of Health.
An
NGO-government partnership in the Philippines has improved access to treatment
for pediatric cancer, a leading cause of death in children aged 1-14, according
to the Department of Health (DOH).
“The
first results suggest that our program has raised the survival rate for
childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) from 20 to 50 percent. To achieve
this, we addressed two issues: the high price of medicines in the country, and
unaffordable out-of-pocket payments for families,” Pia Cayetano, a
parliamentarian, told IRIN in the capital region of Metro Manila.
There
are 3,500 cancer cases in children younger than 15 each year in the
Philippines, and around half of them are ALL, a cancer that affects the blood
and bone marrow, according to the Manila-based NGO Cancer Warriors Foundation,
Inc. (CWFI).
Nationwide,
eight of every 10 children with pediatric cancer died in 2008 (a total of 2,800
deaths).
“The
first obstacle to saving more children from ALL in the Philippines was the
prices of drugs – among the highest in Asia,” said Carmen Vallejo Auste,
co-founder of CWFI.
Management
Sciences for Health, an NGO based in Boston in the United States, studied the
prices paid for 42 essential cancer medicines in 2010 by the governments of
low- and middle-income countries.
For ten
of the medicines, some governments paid as much as ten times more than others
did, while for 23 more drugs some governments paid double the price compared to
others.
The
wide price variations were caused preferential deals offered by drug companies
to buyers who were able to negotiate lower prices.
The
Philippines is in a region that has some of the world’s highest of
out-of-pocket costs to patients, according to the World Health Organization
(WHO). In 2009, the government passed a law that put a price ceiling on 21 of
the essential medicines on the WHO list of these drugs.
The
government also successfully negotiated with drug companies, bringing down by
50-75 percent the prices of nine pediatric chemotherapy drugs used to treat
ALL, and the savings were passed on to patients.
According
to the DOH, 14 public hospitals have provided these medications at no cost to
children with ALL since 2009.
“CWFI’s
role was to collect and disseminate information about health issues, to
instigate negotiation between all the actors of the health sector, and to
provide limited financial support,” said Auste.
Childhood
cancers are relatively rare, representing around three percent of all cancers
in the country’s general population, but they are among the top three killers
of children aged 5-14.
Worldwide,
every year there are 175,000 new childhood cancer cases in youngsters under the
age of 15, and 96,000 deaths, according to the U.S. National Cancer Institute
(NCI).
Childhood
cancers are often very different from those seen in adults, and the NCI says
the causes are largely unknown.
What is
known is their burden on the often overstretched health care systems of
developing countries, where some 55 percent of 12.7 million new cancer cases
and 64 percent of 7.6 million cancer deaths occurred in 2008, according to the
Harvard-based initiative, Global Task Force on Expanded Access to Cancer Care
and Control in Developing Countries.
Source: IRIN
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