Monitoring Financial Flows for Health Research 2007 – Behind the Global Numbers

In 1990, the Commission on Health Research for Development estimated that only about 5% of the world’s resources for health research (which totaled US$ 30 billion in 1986) were being applied to the health problems of developing countries, where 93% of the world’s burden of “preventable mortality” occurred. Some years later, the term “10/90 gap” was coined to capture this major imbalance between the magnitude of the problem and the resources devoted to addressing it.