Poor access to essential medicine by children and other vulnerable groups in the developing world must be addressed by international organisations, a Vatican official said. Speaking at a meeting of the Human Rights Council in Geneva June 8, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's representative to Geneva-based UN agencies, said that equal and nondiscriminatory access to health care was a basic human right guaranteed in several different international conventions.
However, he said, those rights "are far from being realised" in the world's poorest nations. People in developing countries suffer "diseases of poverty" 10 times more than those in wealthier countries because of this lack of availability of basic tools and medicines, Archbishop Tomasi is quoted saying by the Catholic News Service.
Poverty-related diseases include HIV, AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, and they are often aggravated by hunger or malnutrition.
Children are particularly deprived of access to medicines, one reason being that pediatric dosages for many medicines, including antiretroviral medications used in cases of HIV and AIDS, have not been established, and parents or health care workers must guess how to divide adult doses, Archbishop Tomasi said.
He said problems raised by patent and intellectual property rights in providing access to medicines in poor countries have been addressed but not solved.
Intense international debate on the subject shows that "the international community has not yet succeeded in its aim to provide equitable access to medicines" and indicates the need for "further creative reflection and action in this regard," he said.
SIC: CTHAUS