"Silent pandemic" will force drug price rethink

LONDON (Reuters) - A "silent pandemic" of chronic disease is creeping up on poor countries and will force pharmaceutical firms to take a more tiered approach to pricing some of their most lucrative medicines.

But the price of many of these medicines and their unsuitability for emerging markets are high barriers to access.

And yet unless those hurdles are overcome, experts say, chronic diseases could swamp developing health systems and kill many millions -- and the hopes of drugmakers like GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer and Sanofi-Aventis of supplying vast new markets in emerging economies will struggle to come to fruition.

Discounting prices for poorer countries, a move already made by some big drug firms, is a start. But pharmaceutical bosses will also be under pressure to join patent pools to promote downward price pressure on drugs for major chronic diseases by increasing the number of producers, and may face legal challenges to force them to allow in more generic competition.

"Until now companies had been able to separate out drugs that are needed in developing countries from drugs that primarily make up their market in rich countries," Tido von Schoen-Angerer, director of Medecins Sans Frontieres'' campaign for access to essential medicines, told Reuters in an interview.

"But the divide which saw infectious diseases as primarily affecting the poor and chronic diseases affecting the rich is now changing, and that will demand a change of strategy."

THE SHIFTING BURDEN OF DISEASE

Global health projections leave little doubt that chronic diseases are rapidly overtaking infectious diseases, such as malaria, AIDS and tuberculosis (TB), as the world''s biggest killers -- a shift emphasized by a recent World Health Organization (WHO) report on global health risks.

It said populations are aging partly due to success against infectious diseases, and changing patterns of food, alcohol and tobacco consumption are creating a "double burden" for poor nations, piling chronic diseases on top of infectious diseases.

The World Economic Forum''s 2010 global risks report, published ahead of its annual meeting in Davos next week, characterized the shift as a "silent pandemic."

It said that while deaths from infectious diseases, maternal conditions and poor nutrition will fall by 3 percent in the next decade, deaths from chronic disease will increase by 71 percent.