The World Health Organisation (WHO) has added new curative treatments for cancers and Hepatitis C to its essential medicines list, urging that prices needed to fall to make them accessible to patients in low income countries.

WHO Director-General, Dr Margaret Chan in a statement today said “When new effective medicines emerge to safely treat serious and widespread diseases, it is vital to ensure that everyone who needs them can obtain them and lacing them on the WHO Essential Medicines List is a first step in that direction.”

The treatment of hepatitis C, which affects about 150 million people globally and kills around half a million each year, has been transformed by the arrival of new drugs, such as Gilead’s Sovaldi.

These products can cure hepatitis C but are out of reach at Western prices to patients in poor countries, with a single Sovaldi pill costing N200,000 ($1,000)in the United States.

“While some efforts have been made to reduce their price for low-income countries, without uniform strategies to make these medicines more affordable globally the potential for public health gains will be reduced considerably,” WHO Assistant Director General Marie-Paule Kieny said.

According to the WHO, cancers figures are among the leading causes of illness and death worldwide, with approximately 14 million new cases and 8.2 million cancer-related deaths in 2012.

“The number of new cases is expected to rise by about 70 per cent over the next two decades. New breakthroughs have been made in cancer treatment in the last years, which prompted WHO to revise the full cancer segment of the Essential Medicines List this year: 52 products were reviewed and 30 treatments confirmed, with 16 new medicines included in the List.”

Dr Kees De Joncheere, WHO Director of Essential Medicines added that

“Some of these medicines produce relevant survival benefits for cancers with high incidence, such as trastuzumab for breast cancer.

“Other treatment regimens for rare cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma, which can cure up to 90 per cent of patients, were added to set a global standard.”

The WHO’s Model List of Essential Medicines, which is updated every two years, is used by governments around the world to help determine which treatments they should make available. The latest version, published on Friday, includes several new drugs for cancer and multi-drug resistant tuberculosis.