| Reply | Next | Previous | Up |
From: Lowell Greenberg
General: Health
Remote Name: 12.213.120.131
Quoting from The Health GAP Coalition White Paper: "Globalization and Unequal Access to Health Care: Resources for People with AIDS and Other Life-Threatening Illnesses," "Today most of the world's people are denied access to lifesaving medications due to abuse of drug patent protection, high prices, and unfair government policies." "About 90% of people with HIV live in developing countries, and have no access to any scientifically proven treatment for the infection. Patients with drug-resistant tuberculosis, certain cancers, and other deadly diseases also need medications that they cannot possibly obtain because of price." See also the Washington Post Special Report: "Death Watch: AIDS in Africa." Diseases such as polio, which should have been eradicated well before the year 2000 through global immunization, still harm the lives of children and adults throughout the world. The crushing effects of poverty, often compounded by civil war and hatred, have resulted in denial of vaccines and medical care to those most in need. Quoting from the Boston Globe article, "Ending a Scourge- a dream deferred:" "In 1999, the number of new cases [of Polio] was estimated at 20,000 worldwide, with laboratory-confirmed cases standing at 7,143; for the first eight months of this year, the number of new confirmed cases had dropped to 1,148. Officials cautioned that the numbers could shoot up again during the next four months because of a hang-up in lab certifications, but progress has been swift in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, which in 1999 accounted for 53 percent of all new cases. So far this year, the three countries account for 31 percent of cases." Children are often the silent victims of denied medical care. The organization, "Healing the Children," was started by Cris and Gary Embleton in their efforts to save the life of one child: "Abandoned in an Asian land, sick and malnourished, her chances were not good from the start. Five dollars worth of medicine could have saved her, but it wasn’t available in her native country. In 1974, Gary and Cris Embleton fought to save her." -from "Healing the Children's History." The global nature of the problem is underscored by the World Health Organization's, World Health Report 2000. Quoting from the overview section of this report: "...Poorly structured, badly led, inefficiently organized and inadequately funded health systems can do more harm than good...These failings result in very large numbers of preventable deaths and disabilities in each country; in unnecessary suffering, in injustice, inequality and denial of basic rights of individuals. The impact is more severe on the poor, who are driven into deeper poverty by lack of financial protection against ill-health. In trying to buy health from their own pockets, sometimes they only succeed in lining the pockets of others. " The world's poor not only do not receive health care, but some are used as guinea pigs for experimental drugs that are later approved (or not approved) in the United States and other "first world" nations. According to a Washington Post series, "The Body Hunters," "...The Post examines the booming, poorly- regulated system of international clinical drug testing that far too often preys on the poor and uneducated and betrays its promises to patients and consumers." In some cases the subjects of these clinical drug tests, the so-called "control group," are given placebos, even when medicines exist that could save their lives. Human lives are being devalued to that of laboratory animals.