Report: How 10 top new technologies will help world reach globally-agreed goa...( New medical tools that quickly and accu...)

New medical tools that quickly and accurately diagnose diseases like AIDS and malaria top a list of 10 biotech breakthroughs deemed most important for improving health in developing countries within the decade, science that will dramatically move the world towards its Millennium Development Goals for 2015, according to scientists and ethicists in a major new report to the United Nations.

Newly emerged diagnostic tools detect illness at a molecular level in blood or tissues -- thus improving a patient's chance of survival, conserving scarce resources in poor countries now wasted on inappropriate treatments, and better containing disease outbreaks, according to Genomics and Global Health, being launched Oct. 7 at the 4th World Conference of Science Journalists in Montreal.

Prepared for the Science, Technology and Innovation Task Force of the UN Millennium Project, the report calls for a global institute to share and promote the health and environmental benefits being created through genomic sciences and thereby save tens of millions of lives per year in developing countries.

"Imagine a world in which a doctor in the poorest country can instantly diagnose tuberculosis or malaria, or provide women a way they can prevent HIV-AIDS; where bad water is made safe again. This report is about the pathways to get there," says report co-author Peter Singer, MD, Director of the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics.

The list of top 10 of biotechnologies for improving health in developing countries represents a consensus of 28 eminent scientists canvassed separately in developing and developed countries.

The report details dozens of specific health-improvement applications the 10 new technologies have today and are expected to produce in future.

Examples include sequencing the genomes of parasites responsible for most of the world's human malaria, as well as the mosquito that carries it. Knowledge of these genomes, paired wi
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Contact: Terry Collins
terrycollins@rogers.com
416-538-8712
University of Toronto Joint Center for Bioethics
7-Oct-2004

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