Cheap IVF offers hope to childless millionsPOOR and war-torn, Sudan might be the last place you would expect to find an experiment in cutting-edge fertility treatments. But by the end of October, a clinic at the University of Khartoum plans to offer in vitro fertilisation to couples for less than $300, a fraction of its cost in the west.
The clinic is one of three funded by the Low Cost IVF Foundation (LCIF) of Massagno, Switzerland, the brainchild of IVF pioneer Alan Trounson, who is now president of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. The other clinics are in Arusha, Tanzania, and Cape Town, South Africa.
Meanwhile a task force set up by the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) is also set to make IVF affordable for African couples, by vastly simplifying conventional IVF technologies. By the end of the year it plans to begin offering IVF at clinics in Cairo and Alexandria, in Egypt, for around $360.
If successful, such efforts could lower the cost of IVF everywhere. In the US, the price of one round of treatment can be up to $12,000 and is rarely covered by health insurance. In the UK, it costs about ?5000 ($8000), which the National Health Service may or may not pay for, depending on where a couple lives.
"Most of what we do in the western world is overkill," says Jonathan Van Blerkom of the University of Colorado at Boulder, a member of the ESHRE team. "If you get these procedures down to a low cost and they are successful, you cannot justify charging $12,000 for an IVF cycle."
It may come as a surprise that the revolution in low-cost IVF is beginning in Africa, given its high birth rate. However, some 10 to 30 per cent of African couples are infertile, often as a result of untreated sexually transmitted diseases, botched abortions and post-delivery pelvic infections. In Sudan, 20 per cent are infertile, double the rate in Europe and the US.
What's more, childless women in many African countries can face public ridicule, accusations of witchcraft, loss of financial support, abandonment and divorce, not to speak of their own shame and depression. "If you are not able to conceive, you are not [considered] normal," says gynaecologist Abdelrahim Obaid Fadl Allah of the University of Khartoum clinic.
So how do the ESHRE group and the LCIF propose to lower the cost of IVF so drastically? "What we did was to say, 'let's take all the complicated high technology out of the process'," says Trounson. "The idea is to provide a service rather than a business."
Full article here.
This one bugs me a bit. I'm not sure that, given the current situation in many places, "childless millions" are not a better bet than more population growth. I'm also not sure that the time and effort being spent on this could not be better spent on other things in those countries.
Topic: Cheap IVF offers hope to childless millions