Access to the Global Medicine Supply
Reading news about the high mortality rate of women and children in various parts of the developing world might make you suspect that the global medicine supply is strained. Actually, the supply of drugs and treatments is not lacking. What many people lack is the access to this supply of medicine and the doctors who can provide adequate diagnosis. This lack of access alone is contributing to the death of millions of people every year.
The Impact of the Lack of Access to Medicine
Experts estimate that around 10 million children die each year due to maladies such as pneumonia, diarrhea, AIDS and malaria. Every year half a million women die during childbirth due to complications with their pregnancies. These causes of death are easily prevented in the developed world, where patients have access to doctors and to medicine. However, many of the people living in the developing world rarely see a doctor. Those doctors that they can find often do not have access to the drugs/technology they need to treat their patients.
In 2005, a global pediatric program discovered that none of the afflicted children in 12 countries received treatment for their HIV infections. While the grave nature of their infection is known, many do not know that many treatments and drugs exist (which can greatly lengthen the lifespan of an infected person). Without receiving proper treatment, these children will experience unnecessarily shortened lives.
How to Increase Access to the Global Medicine Supply
The key to increasing access to the global medicine supply is to lower the prices of the various drugs used to treat conditions and diseases such as malaria, pneumonia, tuberculosis and AIDS. Recently, organizations working for this cause have managed to lower the prices of drugs used to treat these diseases by as much as 90 percent in some cases. Since 2005, millions of children have begun to receive the kind of treatment that improves the quality of life in many similarly afflicted people in the developed world.