QUOTES
"We
have tried to demystify medical care and decrease the control of the medical profession
and instead promote the paramedic, the village-level health worker, as the backbone
of health care. This has led to both capability building and job creation for
the poor, especially poor women, as well as putting health care within the reach
of those who have not in the past had access to it."
Inequality
is on the increase everywhere in the world. The divisions of North and South,
rich and poor, women and men continue to deepen. The push for global patenting
will exacerbate these inequalities and inhibit the development potential of our
countries.
Cost
and availability of drugs is critical. Yet, if patenting is permitted local production
of drugs will be cut down and both affordability and availability of drugs will
decrease drastically.
The
task before all of us here, in the South and in the North, is to organise resistance
to the imposition of the existing concept of Intellectual Property Rights used
in World Bodies. It is not only detrimental to the peoples and economies of Third
World countries, in the long run it will undermine the prospects for global harmony
and "one world", and slowly kill the aspirations of the common people all over
the world that had been created by the advancement of science.
Ill
health is an important factor that forces the poor to remain poor. If they make
a little bit of money, one episode of illness can wipe them out.
