LONDON (Reuters) - Obesity drugs will not join the World Health Organization's (WHO) latest essential medicines list, but treatments for diseases, including Ebola and multiple sclerosis will, documents published by the U.N. agency showed.
The WHO's essential medicines list is a catalogue of the drugs that should be available in all functioning health systems.
Inclusion on the list can have great significance for access: for example, experts say adding HIV drugs in 2002 helped make them much more widely available to AIDS patients in poorer countries.
A group of U.S. academics had proposed including obesity drugs on the WHO list for the first time earlier this year, focused particularly on the active ingredient liraglutide in Novo Nordisk's obesity drug Saxenda.
But a WHO expert panel on Wednesday recommended against adding the drugs for weight loss, citing the "uncertain long-term clinical benefit and safety in this patient population".
Benedikt Huttner, WHO team lead for the EML, said in a press conference on Wednesday that there were also "uncertainties" about how long to use the treatments "because often when you stop the treatments there is a rebound in weight gain".
But he said the medicines may be reconsidered in future when there is more long-term evidence.
