The Story of Eflornithine
African sleeping sickness is, pretty much, deadly. You get bit by a tsetse fly, you get a protozoa inside you, and if left untreated, you die. Eflornithine was discovered in the 1990′s–it’s nicknamed “the resurrection drug” for its ability to basically cure comatose people infected with African sleeping sickness. When the disease gets really bad, it enters your brain and spinal cord; eflornithine can also enter the brain and spinal cord however, and kill the protozoa making the patient sick. The other major treatment for severe sleeping sickness is called melarsoprol, but it’s much more toxic and much more dangerous; it carries with it a 4-12% risk of killing the patient.
So we’ve got a pretty good drug for treating this serious, fatal disease, and it has few side effects (sore throat). However, it’s surprisingly expensive to make, and since the countries with sleeping sickness are primarily poor, developing nations, drug manufacturers stopped making the drug. No big deal. Sleeping sickness only affects 500,000 people annually. Hi, sarcasm.
In 2001, Aventis, the patent-holder, donated $12.5 million to provide 60,000 doses, and an oral form of the drug is being developed.
Lucky for those dying Africans, eflornithine has a new market: slowing the growth of unwanted facial hair. Personally, I find it disgusting that we went 6 years without a better drug with less side effects (and mortalities) because it wasn’t profitable ($12.5m is pennies for Aventis). But I find it absolutely disgraceful that the unwanted facial hair drug, Vaniqa, advertises using what appears to be a tsetse fly on a woman’s face, as well as other bugs. The quote on the homepage sums it up nicely:
bq. What a burden that has been lifted from my life! I feel so free now to be who I really am. I’m not at all self-conscious with people.
Is this how far we’ve come? The burden of facial hair is more important to us than totally preventable deaths in Africa? We have the means, but not the will to do it.
feeling bad using my acne cream now … and my cologne too :(
disgusting
That’s outrageous. What is the world comming to?
60,000 doses for $12.5 Mil. means $208.33 / dose. An adult course of treatment is 1 dose every 6 hours for 14 days (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/uspdi/202609.html), or 56 doses. which comes to $11,666 per patient. At 500,000 cases a year, that comes to $5.8 billion to treat all sleeping sickness patients. More than Aventis can afford, but affordable by the world community. Questions to be asked though include: Could $5.8 billion spent towards another unfunded need save greater than 500,000 lives? Is the sum of the need of all programs which can save lives in Africa (AIDS, Malaria, Sleeping Sickness, Hunger, etc.) greater than what the developed world is able to provide? I don’t know.
Thanks for finding that statistic, Jim! Eflornithine’s actually only necessary as a “big gun,” that is, when the parasite gets really serious and gets into the person’s brain and spinal cord. So while there are 500,000 cases of African sleeping sickness infection, there would be fewer that need elfornithine (because most disease is caught before it progresses that far).