January 2013 Archives

Katie with the hosts of the US Chamber Business Civic Leadership Center report release event at the INOVA Fairfax Hospital Campus in Falls Church, VA

Dr. King once said, "Life's most persistent and urgent question is what are you doing for others?  In that spirit, nearly 10,000 volunteers, including Vice President Biden and his family, US Department of Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano, and some GSK employees from the DC office, assembled 100,000 care packages for US soldiers this past Saturday in honor of MLK Day of Service.

A DJ spun  great music as thousands of volunteers danced, socialized, and went through lines writing personal thank you notes to soldiers and assembling care kits for US military personnel, disabled veterans and civilian first responders. As GSK's director of US community partnerships, I know first-hand that creating a venue that allows 10,000 people to give back in such a meaningful way is no easy feat. It takes tremendous partnerships among many civic-minded organizations. AmeriCorps, the Corporation for National and Community Service, Points of Light, Target, Serve DC, HandsOn Greater DC Cares, Volunteer Fairfax, the Community Blueprint, George Washington University and Operation Gratitude all came together and partnered on this event, and I tip my hat to them.

Across the nation, people are volunteering in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., including 4,000 in Philadelphia where GSK is a proud sponsor of the Philadelphia MLK Day of Service.  In Philly, there are more than 150 projects underway, including a book drive, a kids' carnival, a job fair, and a health and wellness fair.  

On this special day, I encourage you to remember that you have the ability to make a powerful and positive difference in the life of someone else. As Dr. King said, "Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve."  To learn more about MLK Day of Service, click here, and to learn more about GSK's community partnerships, click here.

Sometimes our New Year's resolutions are gone before the month of January ends. But others can genuinely spur us to thoughtful action and long-term change.

An important set of resolutions dedicated to freeing millions of people from disability and disease were made a year ago by GlaxoSmithKline and 12 other global pharmaceutical companies along with the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other groups.

Together we committed to accelerate the fight against neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) and to control or eliminate 10 of 17 NTDs by 2020.  This commitment is known as the London Declaration against NTDs.

NTDs affect more than 1 billion people around the world, causing illness, disability and death. They are found in the world's poorest countries, where there is limited access to healthcare, clean water, sanitation and good nutrition.

Some treatments exist. Five NTDs can be tackled by a single annual treatment (e.g. lymphatic filariasis (LF), onchocerciasis, intestinal worms, schistosomiasis and trachoma), and for many people, the beneficial impact of a treatment will be immediate. But for other NTDs, research is urgently needed to develop new and better treatments.

The progress our coalition reports today includes that:

·         We fully met requests for 1.12 billion treatments for NTDs.

·         29 countries began receiving drugs to treat or prevent soil-transmitted helminthes, resulting in an almost six-fold increase in treatments.

·         There was increased funding and collaboration to improve outcomes.

·         Two NTD diagnostic tests received regulatory approval.

Since 1998, GSK has partnered with WHO, the Gates Foundation, the Carter Center and others to rid the world of LF. More commonly known as elephantiasis, LF is one of the world's leading causes of permanent disability and disfigurement. The disease affects 120 million and threatens a further 1.3 billion people in 73 countries.

The same medicine, albendazole, treats soil-transmitted helminths (STH or intestinal worms). STH infection can stunt growth and cause anaemia and malnutrition. Often a child's ability to learn and their performance at school are affected.  Between these two programmes, GSK has delivered, to date, more than 3 billion doses of albendazole to the world's neediest people.

GSK has committed to provide up to 1 billion tablets of albendazole each year to the WHO - 600 million tablets to tackle LF and an additional 400 million tablets to treat school-age children at risk of intestinal worms.

We are also working to support with research into new and better treatments for NTDs. Dedicated scientists at our research center at Tres Cantos, Spain are studying treatments for Chagas, dengue fever, and leishmaniasis.

Partnership is essential to achieving these goals, and GSK is applying our 'open innovation' approach to these areas. We have opened up our intellectual property and know-how to others to help encourage more research into NTDs. We have opened access to our Tres Cantos laboratory for independent researchers to use our facilities to advance their own study of these diseases. And we have established a not-for-profit organization to support these projects using $8.047 million (£5 million) in funding from GSK.

There is still a long way to go in this battle but we continue to make progress and importantly, together with our partners, have agreed a way to measure our outputs and outcomes that will encourage even more results.

As a global healthcare company with a long history and presence in the developing world, we are determined to play our part in helping to improve healthcare and quality of life for people, no matter where they live.

By combining our effort with others as in the London Declaration, we have the power to consign to history many preventable diseases that kill, disfigure and disable millions of people in the world's poorest countries every year. That's a resolution we renew this year along with a promise to report on our progress.