The WHO has called upon its member countries to figure out ways to make low cost drugs available to the diseased in poor countries, despite regulatory and profit contentions from pharmaceutical firms.
World Health Organization (WHO) Chief, Margaret Chan, on November 5, 2007, called for early global agreements to make sure that poor people in many developing countries get drugs at affordable prices, as per the news published by Reuters.
Chan appealed the developed as well as developing nations to chart out ways to maintain supplies of low-priced drugs along with continued benefits for pharmaceutical companies to research and develop new-age medicines.
Every country feels the need for medicine. But in poor countries, people lack sufficient means to buy them. Many ailing patients in poor countries die due to this reason. At times, diseases develop resistance to drugs because people are not treated on time and properly.
Also, the upsurge in chronic diseases is imposing a great burden on low-income and middle-income countries. This calls for urgent necessity of affordable and effective medicines even more critical. In cases, when people become dependent on medicines for their whole life, the costs escalate massively for households, health industry, and even government budgets.
The WHO has itself earlier declared that still, 74% of AIDS drugs are under monopoly, and 77% of the Africans still have no facilities for treatment of AIDS, as per the news published by Medindia.
The pharmaceutical industry claims that it needs sufficient profits from drug sales to fund research and development of new drugs. Also, it drags the WHO into regulatory issues of patent protection and infringement that rests in the ambit of the WHO and the World Intellectual Property Organization.
The 193 member states of the WHO are optimistic of devising a global policy on the highly contentious topic of drug development, pricing and patenting by mid November 2007.
A Senior Research Analyst at RNCOS opines, “The initiatives of World Health Organizations towards making medicines easily available for poor countries shows that it is dutiful, owes moral responsibility, and is functioning with honesty. The low-priced drugs will prevent life threatening diseases to a great extent. Also, this will help increase the economic condition of the poor as well as developing countries as the money that they spend in buying drugs will go into their savings”.
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