Neglected Tropical Diseases Canada Funding Tracker
Last year, one of the contributors to the ghtech site, Dr. Rebecca Goulding, published a paper with Dr. Patrica Gabriel and other Universities Allied for Essential Medicines colleagues, on the proportion of Canadian basic science research funding being dedicated to Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs). This paper detailed how over the previous ten years (1999-2009) the Canadian government dedicated 0.001% of GDP to NTD funding and compared this total to both the European Union (0.003% of GDP) and the United States (0.009% of GDP). The paper concluded that there was (and remains) an opportunity for the Canadian government to increase the level of NTD funding to respond to the drug NTD R&D funding crisis.
The authors felt that if the data from the paper were accessible in a simpler, more intuitive format, it could be better used to compare across time and between countries, and that this might help make the argument for increased funding more tractable. Global Health Technologies has therefore developed an application to help you explore the data from this paper. Clicking on the button below will launch a new window with our NTD Tracker application. By selecting a year and an NTD keyword the application will display all funding granted by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) during that year for research on that disease. Please note that the NTD mapper does not cover other important aspects of NTD research (although this would be great to do), such as health systems and social determinants of health research. We are currently working to augment the data from Rebecca's paper by adding the most current CIHR data as well as data from the US National Institutes of Health.
We hope that you find this application instructive. We welcome your comments - please submit them here.
Full paper reference: