WHO's director-general Ms Gro Harlem Brundtland said so-called out-of-pocket payments by patients accounted for as much as 90 per cent of total healthcare spending in some poor countries. "For many the reality is stark: no cash, no cure," she said.
Life-saving medicines are not available to one-third of the world's population despite a long international campaign for wider access to essential drugs, according to the World Health Organisation.
In the 25 years since WHO drew up its essential drugs and medicines list, the number of people able to obtain these medicines had doubled, but there remains "a huge unfinished agenda", Mr Jonathan Quick, who heads the project, said yesterday.
"We still have two billion people who can't regularly get medicines when they need them, at a quality they trust and at a price they or their community can afford," he told health experts at a discussion attended by journalists.
The UN health agency's list includes more than 300 medicines and aims to guide mainly Third World governments and health bodies on what drugs should be available, at what quality and price and in what dosage. In poor countries, where average income is often $1 or $2 a day, the burden of financing healthcare often falls on the sick.