Former UN High Commissioner supports Index

“We accept as being a reliable statistic that some 30,000 children under 5 die every day of preventable disease or sheer hunger. That’s a silent tsunami of children under 5 every week, which is 52 tsunamis every year.

I believe that implementing the right to the highest attainable standard of health should be the ultimate goal of any actions in the field of global public health.
Realizing economic and social rights like the right to health will require shared responsibility, sustained capacity and strengthened accountability at every level from the local village to the national health ministry, from the meeting rooms of intergovernmental organizations to the boardrooms of multinational corporations.
As manufacturers of life-saving drugs and innovators in the development of new treatments, pharmaceutical companies clearly have a significant role to play in making the right to the highest attainable standard of health a reality for all people.

I’ve been impressed by efforts by the Access to Medicine Foundation’s Index released earlier this year, which provides stakeholder views of pharmaceutical good practice and aims to provide the standard against which future performance can be judged.

What I see in such efforts is the emergence of new norms for the pharmaceutical industry, which industry companies themselves must help shape, and we do want them to engage in helping to shape and ultimately endorse along with governments and civil society.

Mary Robinson.”