[e-drug] Reuters-WHO says 2 billion people lack basic medicines

["Rachel COHEN" <Rachel.COHEN@newyork.msf.org>]

E-drug: Reuters-WHO says 2 billion people lack basic medicines
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Reuters - 10/21/2002
[Copied as fair use]

SWITZERLAND: WHO says two billion people lack basic medicines.

GENEVA, Oct 21 (Reuters) - Life-saving medicines are not available to one
third of the world's population despite a long international campaign for
wider access to essential drugs, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said
on Monday.

In the 25 years since the WHO drew up its essential drugs and medicines
list, the number of people able to obtain these medicines has doubled, but
there remains "a huge unfinished agenda," said Jonathan Quick, who heads
the project.

"We still have two billion people who can't regularly get medicines when
they need them, at a quality they trust and at a price they or their
community can afford," Quick told health experts at a discussion attended
by journalists.

The U.N. health agency's list includes more than 300 medicines and aims to
guide mainly Third World governments and health bodies on what drugs should
be available, at what quality and price and in what dosage.  In poor 
countries, where average income is often one or two dollars a day, 
the burden of financing healthcare often falls on the sick.

WHO Director-General Gro Harlem Brundtland said so-called out-of-pocket
payments by patients accounted for as much as 90 percent of total
healthcare spending in some poor countries.  "For many the reality is 
stark: no cash, no cure," she said.

Bernard Pecoul of Medicins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) said
patents, particularly on AIDS treatments, translated into high prices "with
the direct result that people in developing countries cannot afford to save
their own lives".

"We cannot accept the sick logic that says he who cannot pay, dies," he
said.

Rachel COHEN
MSF Access Campaign, New York
  <Rachel.COHEN@newyork.msf.org>
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