By Martin Banks - 9th December 2008
This is a very positive initiative and I welcome it
Vladimír Špidla
EU commissioner Vladimír Špidla has welcomed plans by the world's biggest insulin maker to provide diabetes care, including free medication, to 10,000 children in Africa.
Danish drugs firm Novo Nordisk said it had a moral obligation to save lives in places where insulin was too pricey for families and the focus was on more prominent diseases such as HIV-AIDS.
The move was greeted by Špidla, commissioner for social affairs and equal opportunities, who said, “This is a very positive initiative and I welcome it.”
Launching the €19m project, Jean-Claude Mbanya, president-elect of the International Diabetes Federation, said, "Lots of children in the developing world are dying of diabetes when we have had a life-saving drug for 85 years.”
An estimated 250,000 children in developing countries under the age of 14 have type 1 diabetes with 38,000 of those children are in Africa.
If untreated, diabetes can cause cardiovascular disease, kidney failure, blindness and neurological damage.
Diabetes experts said one of the major problems was that the disease was not well known in poor countries. Often children taken to hospital in a diabetic coma were treated for dehydration or malaria.
Novo Nordisk's five-year programme will start in 2009 in Guinea, Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Tanzania and later extended to six other poor countries.
The firm says it will not only distribute insulin but also train health workers to care for diabetes patients and build infrastructure so that the system will be sustainable. In the long term, the firm hopes governments will be able to take over.
"You can rest assured that we will be knocking on the doors of health ministries when the time comes," said Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Rebien Sorensen.
"It's controversial for us as a company to enter this programme but the alternative is not acceptable," he said.
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