The road to recovery

Despite Brazil's strength in basic scientific and medical research, a large proportion of the population still suffers from ill health. Diseases such as tuberculosis and leprosy are highly prevalent in poor populations, and about 46,000 people die each year from infectious diseases. What is going wrong?

As a 'middle-income' country, Brazil needs to cope with diseases and health problems that are prevalent worldwide, such as diabetes, hypertension and obesity. In addition, it has to deal with neglected diseases, such as malaria and leprosy, and some of the world's 'most-neglected' diseases, such as dengue fever, leishmaniasis and Chagas' disease. But few of the scientific discoveries made in Brazil lead to new drugs for these infectious diseases. This is driving the government into the red, with imported medical products costing billions of dollars each year. Moreover, any successes in health-related biotechnology1, 2, 3 are undermined by the poor delivery of health-care services across the country4 and by the consistently ineffective implementation of education and industrial policies.

Certainly, there has been no shortage of effort by Brazilian researchers. Since 1990, the number of articles published by researchers from Brazilian institutes has steadily increased (see graphic, below). Similarly, the number of Brazilian patent applications at the US Patent and Trademark Office has also increased during this period. But the ratio of patent applications to research papers is low, suggesting that not enough research is being translated into real products5.

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