Bitter Pills:Medicines & The Third World Poor | Page 98

CHAPTER 6
BUYERS BEWARE
Uncontrolled Sales
and Problem Drugs
POOR PEOPLE make sacrifices to buy drugs. Rarely are these a solution to their
problems. The story of one little Bangladeshi girl, struggling for life in a Children's
Nutrition Unit in Dacca, is representative of the predicament of many of the
world's poor.
She came from a village in Comilla, a district about 30 miles from Dacca. Her
mother was poor, a widow, with five other children to feed. The little girl had
fallen ill. She got progressively worse, so to get money for medicines and a doctor
her mother sold some cooking pots and a few other possessions. She even sold
their small piece of land so they could travel to the city. The doctors at the first
hospital they tried said she would have to pay for the child to be admitted. So
they went to Dacca Medical College. The doctors there examined the little girl
and sent them away with a prescription for half a dozen drugs, mostly antibiotics
and multivitamin tonics.
Her mother bought some but she could not afford all the drugs. The child was
getting weaker so she turned to some relatives for help. But they had nothing to
spare. Fortunately, when the mother was getting desperate, some neighbours told
her about the Save the Children Fund Nutrition Unit where she would not have
to pay. By the time the little girl was admitted, she weighed just over 5 kilos (about
11 pounds). At the age of 6, she was only a litle heavier than a newborn baby.
The doctor diagnosed severe protein-energy malnutrition and anaemia. The child's
life was in immediate danger because the haemaglobin level in her blood had
dropped so low that her heart was in danger of stopping. That was not all. She
had other complications, including a chest infection, a urinary tract infection and
worms.
To stand any chance of surviving, the child needed intensive nutrition treatment.
She would have to be fed milk through a nasal tube because she was nearly
unconscious, and she also needed several blood transfusions.
But her mother had been sent away to buy expensive drugs. Even if she had found
the money to pay for them, they could not have saved the little girl's life. The
prescription would have meant money down the drain, because the underlying
cause of the child's serious condition was lack of food. The tragic irony of this
little girl's case is that to get her to the city, to see doctors and buy medicines,
her mother had been forced to sell the best guarantee of her children's health.
Without that piece of land, it was going to be even harder to stop the other children
from getting more seriously undernourished.'"
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