The World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Wednesday it had been granted $9.7 million by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for research on medicines for children.
The research, which seeks to increase the low number of “child size” medicines available around worldwide and particularly in developing countries, will be conducted in cooperation with the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF, the WHO added.
Currently, more than half of the medicines prescribed for children were not developed specifically for pediatric use, and have not been proved safe and effective for use by children, the organization said.
In the absence of medicines tailored for pediatric use, doctors and parents are often forced to use fractions of adult doses. This often means preparing makeshift prescriptions by crushing adult-size doses or dissolving parts of capsules in water, WHO said.
“We must take the guesswork out of medicines for children,” Carissa Etienne, WHO’s assistant director-general, told Reuters.
“Children are suffering and dying from diseases we can treat, and yet we lack the critical evidence needed to deliver appropriate, effective and affordable medicines that might save them.”
For instance, diarrhea, which kills 170 children under the age of 5 every hour throughout the world, could be better fought if the key treatment for the condition, zinc, were available in easily-administered child-size doses, the U.N. agency said.
The new grant will go toward research to determine the best dosages for children, such as smaller tablets of existing treatments, and to establish testing guidelines. Results of the research will be then be provided the pharmaceutical industry, the WHO said in a statement.
The organization quoted Gates Foundation specialist Jaime Sepulveda as saying that improving critical children’s medicines was “a critical global health issue.”
“This program will help provide effective health interventions to children and improve child survival, particularly in the world’s poorest countries,” Sepulveda said.
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