Poverty makes sick

Poverty makes sick

Millions of people in Africa, Asia and Latin America are suffering from serious diseases. High hopes are pinned on the expensive drugs from the industrialised countries. Often these hopes are too high. For many of their diseases are provoked by the circumstances under which they have to live: poverty and social injustice.

170 million people in the world are suffering from malnutrition. More than one billion people in the Third World do not have access to proper drinking water, and three billion have no organised sewage disposal. Each year, millions of people die from these living conditions. Diseases of poverty are the main cause of death in Third World countries. Infectious diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and diarrhoea are increasing and becoming mortally dangerous for people weakened by bad nutrition. Children are the first victims: per year more than two million children die from pneumonia, two million from diarrhoea and around one million from measles.

Neither vitamin supplements, nor appetite stimulating remedies, nor dubious remedies against diarrhoea or colds that German companies are marketing and offering in a large number to the Third World help against these diseases of poverty.

BUKO Pharma-Kampagne speaks out for the human right to healthy living conditions. This is why BUKO Pharma-Kampagne places the negative consequences of economic globalisation and unfair world trade structures under discussion and why BUKO Pharma-Kampagne belongs to the founders of the People’s Health Movement

Top