Expensive medicines are already a major cause of poverty and suffering.
According to the World Health Organisation's Infectious Diseases Report 2000, every year 11 million people die from infectious diseases, many of them because they cannot afford basic medicines. Unable to afford medicine, a mother and two of her daughters face certain death. Belkis's story Countless millions more live with debilitating illnesses for the same reason and two billion people lack access to basic health care. The poor communities with which Oxfam works consistently cite the high price of basic medicines as a major problem, resulting in people cutting short their treatment, or not attending health clinics at all. There are many factors behind this exclusion, including the level of health spending and the state of public health infrastructures within individual nations.