Tuesday,
February 11, 2025
Year : 2, Issue: 24
AFP: The World Health Organization (WHO) yesterday launched a new platform providing cost-free cancer medicines for thousands of children living in low- and middle-income countries, in a bid to improve lagging survival rates.
The first medicines were being delivered to Mongolia and Uzbekistan, the WHO said, with further shipments planned for Ecuador, Jordan, Nepal and Zambia, as part of project’s pilot phase.
The treatments are expected to reach around 5,000 children with cancer this year across at least 30 hospitals in those six nations. “Countries in the pilot phase will receive an uninterrupted supply of quality-assured childhood cancer medicines at no cost,” the UN health agency said in a statement.
The WHO said that childhood cancer survival rates in low- and middle-income countries were often below 30 percent, compared with around 80 percent in high-income countries. “For too long, children with cancer have lacked access to life-saving medicines,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
