Company Analysis - Institute for OneWorld health
Heal the Sick: Stating the Obvious?
With an estimated 2.7 billion people surviving on less than US$2 a day, the need
to provide more affordable medicines to developing countries seems a vital and simple moral concept to support.
But as with all such policies that involve as many different parties as this does, a solution is far from easy. Many have disregarded the governmental and political issues involved, and having accepted that charitable donations offer only temporary respites, focus has turned to the source of these medicines, the pharmaceutical companies, in an attempt to reduce the differences in quality of care between nations. Bearing in mind that drug prices have to cover the costs of numerous other projects that did not make it to launch, it is unsurprising that nations with smaller health budgets, or in
some cases no budget at all, are struggling to provide medicinal aid.
Positive action has been observed from the pharmaceutical industry, including that of 39 pharmaceutical organizations which dropped legal action against Nelson Mandela's South African Medicines Act of 1997, which introduced laws to 'broaden access to essential, affordable medication', having previously stated that it infringed intellectual property rights. The Act included measures such as the introduction of transparent pricing mechanisms to force pharmaceutical companies to justify their drug prices, generic substitution of all drugs no longer under patent, the international tendering for medicines in the public sector, and a parallel importation provision that allowed the government to import the same medicine sold by a company or its licensee at a lower price in another country. Public pressure is indeed spurring the pharmaceutical industry to be more charitable, with support for such moves being clearly visible in the results of many opinion polls. In a National Opinion Poll commissioned by the UK Volunteer Services Overseas (VSO) organization in 2001, 87% of people stated that developing countries should pay less for drugs for diseases such as HIV/AIDS.
There are around 8,000 deaths worldwide per day from HIV/AIDS infection alone, and over 14 million per year from all infectious diseases, with the majority being in poorer nations. The Baragmanath Hospital in Soweto, South Africa, is the largest hospital in the world, catering for a population of over 3 million, and is currently unable to provide the HIV/AIDS therapies successfully utilized in richer nations to reduce related deaths, due to a lack of finance. In fact, 80% of patients in developing countries are having to pay for their own medicines, a situation practically unheard of in developed countries that have health subsidies and insurance programmes in place.
