Coke or drugs

In Uganda and across Africa people are dying of diseases such as malaria and TB because they can't get the drugs to treat them.

Malaria, the commonest killer in Uganda, takes more than 300 lives every day, mostly under-fives and pregnant women. There are pills that can stop malaria in its tracks at an early stage before the sufferer succumbs to a high fever, delirium and, in the worst cases, coma.But go to many health centres and you will be disappointed. Nursing staff shake their heads. "We don't have," they say.

On tables in huts in Uganda and all over Africa, they sell Coca-Cola. The drinks giant has reached into the darkest corners of the continent. Coke is everywhere. Essential medicines, many of them paid for by governments , are not.

Tiriri health centre in Katine , which should have the capacity of a small hospital, has no Coartem, an anti-malarial and the most needed drug in the region. Frequently it has virtually no medicines at all, even paracetamol. Stock-outs are the norm all over Africa. You can get Coke but you can't get a painkiller, an antibiotic or a drug to save your child from malaria.
Tiriri health centre is short of many other drugs – antibiotics, paracetamol, aspirin, quinine injections (a second-line treatment for malaria too severe to be treated by Coartem), diclofenac for pain and inflammation. The empty shelves in government clinics drive people to private drug shops, which have mushroomed in the villages and towns. But because they have to pay and are poor, families can only buy a small handful of pills – not necessarily the right ones and, quite possibly, fakes. Poor people may buy six pills when they need 30, or they will buy 20 and stop after 10 when they feel better, saving the rest for another crisis. That's how resistance grows to antibiotics and to TB and Aids drugs, which can then spread around the globe. In this way, poverty and the inadequacies of public sector drug supply in Africa threaten us all.

Novartis, the huge Swiss drug company , owns the market-leading anti-malarial Coartem . Novartis has dropped its price over the years from $1.57 to 80 cents, but that's still too much in countries such as Uganda. To improve the situation, the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM) in Geneva channels money donated by affluent governments including the UK and US to poor nations to buy supplies of the drug. But in Uganda in 2005, it all went wrong. GFATM suspended all its grants to the country: money was being siphoned off and officials in the ministry of health were blamed. Corruption trials are ongoing.The GFATM scandal has had a huge impact in Uganda. While few doubt the fund had to act to stop its money being diverted into people's pockets, the people who really suffered are those where the anti-malarials ran out.

The battle is now not just to get HIV medicines to people with Aids, but to get a consistent, affordable supply of essential drugs to all who need them.It's too important to leave to the market.

extracted from here