Topic: Insuring Access to Affordable Pharmaceuticals
Country: Comoros
Delegate Name: Sean Tarr
School: Royal Oak High School
Topic page: background guide and all position papers All Comoros position papers GLIMUN 2012 committees
The access to affordable pharmaceuticals is very important to have available for the Comoran people. Currently our country cannot easily gain access to medicine necessary for us, due to a lack of funds our people face and the rarity of physicians among the islands. Ninety percent of the Comoran population is affected by malaria and most live an hour walking distance from the nearest health facility headed by a nurse and rarely a paramedic staff. With the lack of trained physicians, even if there were easy to obtain pharmaceuticals, there is no guarantee that the Comoran people could get the professional help they need.
For people to acquire the drugs they need at lowered costs, there must be compromise between governments and companies creating the drugs. The cost of pharmaceuticals are generally high due to the amount of processing required to create the drugs and then the increase of cost when a company needs to pay for the patents required to maintain the integrity. In order for the country to help lower the cost of pharmaceuticals the government could support the creation and production of them within the country.
In 1988 the World Health Assembly adopted resolution WHA41.16 which requested the Director-General of WHO to initiate programs for the prevention and detection of counterfeit pharmaceuticals and in 2006 the International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeiting Taskforce (IMPACT*) were created due to the increase of counterfeit drugs. These groups are combating the sales of counterfeit drugs worldwide. There are many ideas coming about how to deal with the prevention of fake pharmaceuticals, such as the idea by Ashifi Gogo where there is a code on the pharmaceuticals and when the user acquires the drugs he then sends the code,via SMS, to verify if the drugs are authentic or not. This idea does have its downsides but it is just one of the many ideas that have been presented to help prevent the use of harmful pharmaceuticals.
To prevent more people from being affected by the counterfeit drugs countries must inform the citizens of the dangers caused by the counterfeit drugs. The spread and use of counterfeit drugs would drop if there was greater education on what to look for when purchasing pharmaceuticals and how to tell the difference between the real drugs and the fake ones.
To be able to ensure the access to affordable pharmaceuticals around the world everyone must work together to meet this goal and Comoros is willing to work towards this goal.
