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Chapter 31 - The Health Impact Fund

How to Make New Medicines Accessible to All

from Section 6 - Shaping the Future

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2021

Solomon Benatar
Affiliation:
Emeritus Professor of Medicine, University of Cape Town
Gillian Brock
Affiliation:
Professor of Philosophy, University of Auckland
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Summary

Some 500 million people, including 260 million children under the age of five, have died from hunger and remediable diseases in peacetime in the 30 years since the end of the cold war. This is vastly more than have perished from wars, civil wars, and government repression over the entire twentieth century. And poverty continues unabated, as the official statistics amply confirm: of the 7.6 billion people alive today, 821 million are officially counted as undernourished, 150 million are homeless and about 1.6 billion lack adequate shelter, 2.1 billion have no safe drinking water at home, and 4.5 billion lack safe sanitation, 1.2 billion lack electricity, 2 billion are lacking access to essential medicines, 750 million adults are illiterate, and 152 million children (aged 5–17) are victims of child labor – often under slavery-like and hazardous conditions as soldiers, prostitutes, or domestic servants or in agriculture, construction, or textile or carpet production.

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