Health(3) 2300

May 02, 2012

Report: Funding Global Health Helps US Economy Grow

Vidushi Sinha

A new report by a coalition of global health groups says the United States is the world's top economic supporter of global health research and development. Not only is that a boost for the fight against disease, the report says, it's also good for the U.S. economy.

This project to develop a vaccine against tuberculosis is just one example of the kind of work the U.S government has been supporting.

Overall, in fact, the United States contributed $12.7 billion to global medical research between 2000 and 2010. The money went to help develop better drugs, vaccines and treatments. And advocates say that effort should continue.

“Nearly 45 products were licensed for use in the developing world and of those products U.S. government helped invest in over half,” said Kaitlin Christenson, director of the Global Health Technologies Coalition - a group made up of 40 private health organizations. The coalition and the independent research group Policy Cures put together the report on the impact of U.S. funding toward global health products.

Dr. Javier Guzman, the director of Policy Cures, said it's about more than just fighting disease in developing countries.

“This is also about the U.S. economy. The report shows that 64 cents out of every dollar is actually going to U.S. based researchers and developers, and that is creating a lot of jobs," said Guzman.

Health professionals say it also makes sense to fight diseases globally because infectious disease knows no boundaries. They say it is critical to continue the fight against deadly infections beyond America's borders.

Christenson said for the first time in many decades there now is a robust pipeline of new drugs and vaccines against killer diseases, such as malaria, meningitis, HIV and tuberculosis.

“We can expect great breakthroughs in various diseases area,” she said.

“It is about renewing their commitments about sustainable funding and about making the funding smarter to clearly get the benefits from the investments,” said Guzman.

Global Health experts say that any scaling back of investments might imperil many products now in development. And they say continued U.S. funding is key to the next generation of global health products.

Posted Friday, May 4th, 2012 at 12:30 pm(4) 3000

The U.S. jobless rate edged lower in April, but the government said Friday that job growth in the world's largest economy was modest.

The Labor Department said the unemployment rate fell a tenth of a percentage point from March to 8.1 percent last month. But for the second straight month, more workers left the labor market and thus were not counted in the U.S. employment survey.

At the same time, employers added another 115,000 workers to their payrolls last month, but that was well below the 160,000 figure that economists had predicted. The April figure also fell below the 154,000 jobs added in March and signaled that corporations have markedly slowed their hiring. The American economy had added more than 250,000 jobs a month early in the year.

The state of the U.S. economy has emerged as the dominant issue in the country's presidential election campaign, heading to the vote in November.

The Republican challenger, one-time venture capitalist Mitt Romney, called the latest employment report “terrible and very disappointing.” He said U.S. economic fortunes “seem to be slowing down, not speeding up. This is not progress.”

U.S. President Barack Obama, a Democrat seeking a second four-year term, told a group of high school students just outside Washington that the economy is improving and had created 1 million jobs in the last six months. He said he would urge Congress next week to approve measures to accelerate job growth even more.

“My message to Congress is going to be, just saying no to ideas that will create new jobs is not an option. There's too much at stake for us not to all be rowing in the same direction.”

A government critic, Robert Romano of the Americans for Limited Government group, told VOA that the drop in the U.S. jobless rate is deceptively favorable.

“The fact that people are giving up on work and that's what's leading to the unemployment rate to drop is not a very good indicator for the state of the American economy and the American people have a right to know what's really going on is that there's no work to be found and folks are just not being counted on that rate.”

Earlier in the year, Mr. Obama touted the labor market's robust job growth. While he remains personally popular, many voters have questioned his oversight of the nation's economy.

Now, analysts say the U.S. could be headed to a third straight year in which the early promise of economic advances tailed off in the ensuing months.

The U.S. has recovered only slowly from its deep recession in 2008 and 2009, its worst downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The country's economic indicators regularly show mixed signs of improvement followed by retreats, especially with employment and overall economic growth.