Here’s How Much More Money Is Needed to Improve Global Health

In a report published in the journal Lancet, researchers point out large gaps in the money raised and dispatched for public health purposes and the medical needs of countries, particularly in the developing world, to keep their populations healthy.

Despite recurrent outbreaks of pandemic infections such as SARS and, most recently, Ebola, donors have committed less than a third of the estimated $3.4 billion that is needed to maintain a strong pandemic preparedness system, according to the World Bank. Overall, donor countries have spent only half of the $6 billion that the World Health Organization says is needed to maintain global public health.

What’s lacking, the study authors say, is a more focused system for investing in global health that emphasizes programs designed to achieve certain public health functions, such as vaccinating a particular population or corralling antibiotic resistance or the spread of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. It’s an approach championed by philanthropic organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the organization that funded the study. Part of the funding conditions of its programs include specifying outcomes and a timeframe for achieving them.

“For example, countries like China and India would substantially benefit from market shaping to lower drug prices and increased international efforts to control multi-drug resistant tuberculosis,” Dr. Marco Schaferhoff, association director of SEEK Development in Germany and one of the co-authors of the report, said in a statement. “At the same time…donor countries should also ensure that vulnerable and marginalized populations in middle-income countries, such as ethnic minorities who suffer discrimination, refugees, and people who inject drugs, receive sufficient support.”