The Mundo Sano Foundation is a family organization founded by Roberto Gold, a pharmaceutical businessman who wanted to give back to society part of what he received throughout his professional career. Despite being a small NGO, it has been working very effectively since 1993 against diseases that have been neglected by the rest of the world and that are currently suffered by 1.6 billion people, such as chagas disease, dengue fever, zika, chikungunya or leishmaniasis. «The work of the foundation is incredible and it is the story of my family. For me it is a pride », she affirms excitedly Marina Gold member of the board of trustees of the Mundo Sano Foundation.
Its objective is to work on long-term intervention strategies that act on all dimensions of diseases, awareness, prevention, diagnosis and treatment. For Marcelo Abril, executive director of the Foundation in Argentina, “we consider this award as the “first gift” of the 30th anniversary that the Foundation celebrates next year.
This organization set out to investigate and create evidence that is useful in public policy. But also to disseminate knowledge because, they explain, they work with neglected diseases and changing the paradigm requires making visible that millions of people suffer from preventable diseases. “We do it through public-private cooperation because the magnitude of the impact on Public Health of these diseases requires the sum of all efforts,” he says. Silvia Gold President of the Mundo Sano Foundation.
The president assures that “translational research and work on the ground is essential. There we identify barriers, implement solutions and provide useful evidence to help improve these health policies and humanize aid.” The foundation’s work model seeks to generate an impact through structural changes that allow us to end these diseases. “We are happy with our work because we have achieved numerous and sustained collaborationss with academies and global health organizations and because, in addition, we have generated evidence that has contributed positively to better public policies”, Gold points out.
The work of the Healthy World Foundation he especially excels in his work to eliminate Chagas disease. His project “No Baby with Chagas” is one of the most exciting and has just finished.
Today many people have access to treatment thanks to the foundation and its public-private cooperation scheme. According to the president, “all the work with this disease has been very relevant because great milestones have been achieved not only at a social level, but also at an institutional level, and because these advances ratify this way of working that we are talking about.”
The foundation has a headquarters and five registered offices in Argentina and Spain, where it has an office in Madrid, and from where programs are executed in Spain and Africa. It also operates in Bolivia, Guatemala, the United States and Paraguay.
The region of Murcia it has become a strategic place in the advances related to Chagas disease. Not only is it the first place in the world where its congenital transmission (from mothers to their children during pregnancy) has been stopped, but the research carried out at the Virgen de la Arrixaca Hospital over the last 15 years has led to the World Health Organization to change its action protocols on this pathology.
The program also includes a pilot project in six pharmacies of the autonomous community in which rapid tests are dispensed and carried out to detect the disease. And he adds that “to this day, the program has made Murcia the first region to cut transmission. With a population of 1.5 million inhabitants, of which 54,000 people are of Latin American origin, it is today the spearhead in demonstrating that this goal is possible.
A healthy world set out to investigate and create evidence that is useful in public policies
Since the Foundation has control over the distribution of the medication, it can be noted that there is not a single Community in Spain that has not carried out at least some treatment. «There have been prescriptions in 190 hospital centers in Spain, so we know that it is not only treated in specialized centers of Medicina Tropicalbut in many medical centers that are thinking of treating Chagas disease, specifies Silvia Gold.
As for his closest targets, Silvia Gold affirms that they will continue in their line of working with preventable and treatable diseases since for the Foundation it is a great moral debt.
The Foundation works to look for actions that can be measured in terms of access “so that people really have access to timely diagnosis and adequate treatment,” the president points out.