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Increasing access to medicines 153
WHO guideline as their approach to healthcare, making it
all but impossible to obtain the most appropriate drugs.
This approach is irrational, and is not good for public
health.
The African healthcare crisis extends beyond the highly
publicised problems of HIV/AIDS and malaria. Although the
international community has paid little attention,
hypertension and diabetes are also widespread in Africa,
and the combined number of deaths from those two
diseases nearly equals the toll from HIV/AIDS.
When it comes to treating those diseases, however,
Africans have limited options. Even those who can afford
drugs that are not on the EML do not have the opportunity
to do so. That is because most African governments allow
the importation of only those drugs that are on the list.
When it comes to drugs for hypertension, for example, there
are only six drugs on the WHO list. If one of those six listed
drugs cannot control an African’s hypertension, he or she
will die because no other hypertension drugs are registered
for sale in that country.
The disease burden in lower-income countries is coming
increasingly to resemble that of higher income countries,
especially in terms of cardiovascular diseases and cancers.
Plenty of new drugs are coming on stream to combat these
diseases, but the rationale behind the EML denies patients in
poorer countries access to these new drugs. This is because
the EML deliberately favours listing generic medicines over
patented ones. In this way, the treatments available to
patients in poorer countries do not match the contours of
the disease burden. This also discourages innovation, as the
EML sends confusing and inaccurate signals with regard to
which diseases are most prevalent at the local level.
Tensions are mounting. In Kenya, a dispute has broken
out between those who import essential medicines and