Red Cross Red Crescent

Humanitarian needs should prevail over commercial concerns to ensure that people in developing countries have access to life-saving drugs, said the International Federation's President, Dr Astrid Heiberg.

"Lives are being lost because access is being denied to life-saving medicine for those living with HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases. This is completely unacceptable. Pharmaceutical companies and the international community can and must find a way round this," she said.

Her comments followed a meeting of the Federation's governance group on HIV/AIDS, which issued a statement saying: "The present balance of resource allocation and pricing of drugs is unacceptable and needs to be redesigned as it does not allow access to care and treatment for the vast majority of people living with HIV/AIDS. This concern is relevant not only for HIV/AIDS patients but also for other major public health problems in developing countries."

HIV/AIDS and associated infections constitute a global public health emergency in which millions of lives have already been lost. Urgent measures are needed to avert an even larger scale disaster, and the present World Trade Organisation system could work to support a suitable humanitarian response, said Dr Heiberg.

Referring to legal actions being taken by the pharmaceutical industry to prevent the production of patented drugs in more affordable generic form, Dr Heiberg said that the public health emergency provisions of the World Trade Organisation framework would be rendered useless if the cases against Brazil and South Africa succeed.

Dr Heiberg called on Red Cross and Red Crescent societies worldwide to support countries like South Africa in the search for solutions to this problem.

According to the World Disasters Report 2000 - published by the Federation - the death toll from infectious diseases is 160 times greater per year than the number killed by natural disasters such as earthquakes, cyclones and floods. An estimated 150 million people around the world have died from AIDS, TB and malaria since 1945, compared to 23 million from war, the report said.

Over 23 million Sub-Saharan Africans are estimated to be HIV-infected, and malaria kills up to 2.6 million people a year - 75 per cent of them children. Most of last year's 13 million deaths from infectious disease could have been prevented at the community level at a cost of just five US dollars per person.

Reducing the impact of HIV/AIDS and other major public health problems is a key component of the International Federation's health activities worldwide.

The International Federation's Secretary General, Didier Cherpitel, will be visiting Zimbabwe and South Africa from March 19 to March 24 to express solidarity with people living with HIV/AIDS and to discuss with National Societies how to scale up Red Cross activities in HIV/AIDS prevention and care.

Facing a high incidence of HIV in Zimbabwe, the Zimbabwe Red Cross Society is now treating the AIDS pandemic as a disaster. The Society is currently assisting over 5,000 people living with HIV/AIDS with assistance from some 500 Red Cross volunteers who have been trained as care-facilitators. Plans are underway to establish home-based care projects in most of the districts in the country.

Related links
More about HIV/AIDS programmes