Medical donations hurt the poor [1]
Wednesday, August 18, 1999 - 09:00. Updated on Thursday, January 7, 2016 - 19:08.
From Matangi Tonga Magazine Vol. 14, no. 3, July 1999.
The study by Harvard University’s School of Public Health released this week, reinforced the belief of many in the development community that a vast amount of medical supplies donated to poor countries was inappropriate and even harmful.
Furthermore, in many cases, the economic and financial benefits to donors outstripped the benefits to needy patients in the countries receiving the medicines. Drug companies received significant tax breaks and charities were able to attract more contributions.
The Harvard study covered the years between 1994 and 1997 and focussed on two unnamed US relief agencies and field studies made in Haiti, Tanzania and Armenia.
The findings showed that: anywhere from 10 to 42 per cent of the drugs donated were not listed by the recipient country or the World Health Organization. About 30 percent of the drugs had a year or less until expiration and six per cent had less than 100 days, which violated WHO guidelines.
Two of the nine health organizations surveyed reported that half of the drugs reaching them already had expired.
Many organizations in Armenia were given large supplies of “combination remedies” that contained both a painkiller and a decongestant, when patients might not have needed both.
The problem of inappropriate drug donations remained current, according to the study. In the conflict in Kosovo, for instance, WHO found that many of the drugs donated to Albania and Macedonia were useless, as they had either expired or were unknown to local health professionals.
While the study raised disturbing questions, the findings did not make a case for abandoning medical aid by drug manufacturers or charities.
Indeed, the study found that much of the aid helped to improve the lives of intended beneficiaries but it also called for greater scrutiny of these activities by bodies such as WHO.
There also is the larger issue that, health and medical donations - even when they are effective - cannot address the fundamental problems of declining health standards and the link with persistent poverty and underdevelopment in many countries. For starters, there must be a reversal of what appears to be the driving forces behind the whole drug-donating business. There is a need to move away from the interests of big drug manufacturers, who get tax breaks when they get rid of unwanted inventories, and those of big charities, seeking to satisfy their financial sponsors by showing that they are very active internationally..
The interest of poor people and poor countries cannot be well served when the Harvard study found that, in Haiti, individuals who hand-carried medicines into the country, in response to specific local requests, were a better source of real help than the US relief agencies who appeared always to have a container “ready to go.”