Poor people medical needs

Reinhardt, Erika. Access to Medicines. UN Chronicle 43, no. 3 (Septem-ber/November 2006) 56-57. The UN offers a way to increase access to desperately needed medications among poor people throughout the world. Countries can take advantage of flexibility built into international patent and trade agreements to buy high-priority medicines for HIV/ AIDS. However, the article criticizes national trademark laws than hinder these types of public health efforts in developing nations. 

Why do some medical needs remain umnet It s not only in cases where the market is small— that is, not enough people have the disorder or the people who have it are poor, uninsured, or inaccessible—it s also because... 

Working at local, national and international levels, in order to develop pro-poor policies based on real evidence of the impact of energy availability on poor people. Provision of energy needs to be given a priority comparable to those given to provision of food, clean water, sanitation, shelter and medical services. 

The sheer quantity of medical information, even within a single speciality, is often beyond the power of one person to comprehend. People, that is, the human brain, simply cannot cope with the amoimt of information that they need to function safely and effectively. For instance, more than 600 drugs require adjustment of doses for multiple levels of renal dysfunction an easy task for a computer, but one which will inevitably be performed poorly by a person (Bates and Gawande, 2003). Machines can therefore aa as a kind of extended memory, which we can access at will, to overcome the transience and limitations of human memory storage. However, these are not the only problems of memory there are other limiting factors which are not always appreciated. 

Alcohol is an important factor in causing thiamin deficiency because it inhibits the active transport of thiamin across the gut and when abused it impairs the quality of the diet consumed. Diuretics accelerate the excretion of thiamin and appear to override the renal conservation mechanism. Their use is of potential concern in elderly people whose diet may be poor for other medical reasons and their physicians may be unaware of their need for supplemental nutrient. 

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