A Brazilian government laboratory said Monday it will begin producing child-sized doses of a drug commonly used to treat Chagas disease, which kills thousands of people each year across the Americas.
The Pharmaceutical Laboratory of Pernambuco said the doses which eliminate the need to cut up adult-sized tablets into as many as 12 pieces would be available at cost to patients across the American hemisphere by 2009.
Chagas is a disease caused by a blood parasite that infects more than 16 million people across the Americas, according to the World Health Organization. Estimates of the yearly death toll range from 13,000 to 50,000 _ all in the Western Hemisphere.
"About 5 percent of children infected die while receiving the treatment, which is very aggressive. The pediatric dose looks to reduce this death rate," said Flavio Gulherme Pontes, a spokesman for the Drugs for Neglected Disease initiative, or DNDi, which helped develop the new treatment.
Pontes said it was unclear exactly how many children die of Chagas each year.
The new dosages became possible after Swiss pharmaceutical manufacturer Roche transferred the rights and technology for benznidazole to the Brazilian government last year, making the Pernambuco lab the drug's sole manufacturer in world.
DNDi, an independent nonprofit dedicated to developing new and improved treatments for neglected diseases like malaria and leishmaniasis, helped engineer the transfer of technology and the idea for the pediatric dosage, Pontes said.
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