Access to Essential Medicines

Access to essential medicines remains a major challenge in most African countries. For the majority of Africans, essential medicines remain largely unavailable and inaccessible.

Factors affecting availability and affordability range from corruption to lack of proper planning that result in stock-outs of medicines for diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis, as well as common and manageable conditions such as diabetes and HIV.

A new booklet on the struggle for access to essential medicines in East and Southern Africa has been released by the Stop Stock-outs campaign partners with the support of Open Society Institute (OSI). It contains a selection of short stories from different parts of East and Southern Africa, describing the great difficulties ordinary people face in accessing essential medicines. 

The booklet further brings out the glaring inequalities that exist between the rich and poor when it comes to accessing basic services. It reveals how most people in many African countries have been forced to forego treatment, accept compromised services or turn to quack cures, while others live in fear of premature death simply because their limited income affects their health choices.

Health Action International (HAI) Africa in collaboration with other civil society organisations will from Monday 22 to Friday 26 June 2009 visit public health institutions to survey the stock-out of essential medicines in five sub-Saharan African countries.

The implementation of the WHO Global Strategy and Plan of Action on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property has become one of the key topics at the 62nd World Health Assembly (WHA), which took place in Geneva May 18-22, 2009. As is obvious, the actions of the various stakeholders; from governments to the WHO Secretariat through to donor governments is the real test of the usefulness of the Global Strategy to the people it was meant to serve.

Consequently, HAI Africa and IQsensato have released, as a working document, a Pilot Monitoring Tool to begin the assessment of implementation, at the national level, of the Global Strategy and Plan of Action.  This tool can be used by different stakeholders, particularly by civil society organisations and researchers to start to monitor the performance of their own governments, the WHO and other stakeholders. While it is the primary responsibility of monitoring the implementation of the Global Strategy lies with WHO, we believe that other stakeholders, especially civil society organisations and researchers can play a critical and complementary role.

The 62nd session of the World Health Assembly is taking place in Geneva Switzerland 18 – 22 May 2009. World Health Organisation's (WHO) pre-assembly announcement listed a number of public health issues to be discussed at the Health Assembly. They include:

* Pandemic influenza preparedness: sharing of influenza viruses and access to vaccine and other benefits;
* Implementation of the International Health Regulations;
* Primary health care, including health system strengthening;
* Monitoring the achievement of the health-related Millennium Development Goals; and
* Social determinants of health.

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