Although the pharmaceutical industry is making modest progress in countering resistance to superbugs, drug companies are not doing enough to ensure greater access to lifesaving antibiotics in low and middle-income countries, a new analysis finds.
Just one-third of 166 treatments assessed have any kind of access strategy in place, such as price adjustments to make antibiotics more affordable or licensing agreements to boost supplies for these countries, according to the report by the Access to Medicines Foundation, an independent, not-for-profit research organization that evaluates drug makers on how they ensure access to medicines.
The findings underscore concerns that providing access to antibiotics increasingly resembles the inequities in making vaccines available to combat the Covid-19 pandemic, explained Jayasree Iyer, who heads the foundation. Among the challenges are small product pipelines and insufficient incentives to ensure that medicines will be made available to lower-income countries.
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