Lack of access to medicine in Latin America taken to rights body

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Agence France-Presse

Lack of access to medicine in Latin America taken to rights body

By AFP 5 hours ago.

Complaints over lack of access to medicine in Latin America were brought before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on Tuesday, with demands that big drug companies be punished for preventing the sale of generics.

Various regional groups highlighted the situation to the IACHR during a hearing held in Panama, saying that 21 percent of Latin America's population had no access to basic health services and that 700,000 people died annually of preventable causes.

This should be qualified as a "crime against humanity," said German Holguin, coordinator for Alianza LAC-Global por el Acceso a Medicamentos, one of the groups.

He argued that pharmaceutical firms that block needed medicines should be punished.

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/world/lack-of-access-to-medicine-in-latin-america-taken-to-rights-body/article/481176#ixzz4S7uLLDB2

[metalbot]

1. I'd be a lot more sympathetic to this article

If it had actual examples.

There are definitely medications that have been developed in the last 40 years that are life saving. However, there is a huge amount of medication that can be developed as generics that can also save lives. Why can't the Latin American countries cited in this article produce those? It's the easy way out to blame big pharma, but the diseases that killed 700k people aren't the ones that we've only found treatments for in the last 40 years.

If we look at India, for example, which has a high (relatively) rate of leperasy, the problem isn't the lack of cheap pharmaceuticals to cure it, but the logistics of finding lepers and treating them, relative to the opportunity costs of spending your health dollars on something else.