ARTICLE
Philippe Duneton is executive director of global health organization Unitaid. Takeshi Akahori is ambassador and assistant minister for global issues in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan. Patrick Amoth is the acting director general for health of Kenya.
Without oxygen, we die. This may seem obvious, but in many health facilities around the world, access to lifesaving medical oxygen is often unavailable and underfunded.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic put oxygen in the headlines, severe shortages of medical oxygen had been a problem for decades. Fewer than half of health facilities in low- and middle-income countries had uninterrupted access. Of the 7.2 million children who typically had a critical need for medical oxygen each year to treat pneumonia in low- and middle-income countries, only one in five received it.
COVID-19 made these problems much worse. Within a matter of weeks, the number of people needing medical oxygen to live increased tenfold. Many hospitals ran out of supplies, leading to countless preventable deaths.
While it is unknown how many of the 25 million deaths as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic were due to a lack of oxygen, studies have shown that hypoxemia, or low levels of oxygen in the blood, was a major cause of death from COVID-19 in low-resource settings.
The need for medical oxygen suddenly became painfully clear, and the world scrambled to respond.
Health institutions, co-led by global health organization Unitaid, launched the Oxygen Emergency Taskforce as part of a groundbreaking collaboration with the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the World Health Organization (WHO) to ensure equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines, treatments and diagnostics.
This article was originally published in Nikkei Asia on 2 February 2024. Read the full article here.
About Unitaid
Unitaid saves lives by making new health products available and affordable for people in low- and middle-income countries. It works with partners to identify innovative treatments, tests and tools, help tackle the market barriers that are holding them back, and get them to the people who need them most – fast. Since Unitaid was created in 2006, it has unlocked access to more than 100 groundbreaking health products to help address the world’s biggest health challenges, including HIV, TB, and malaria; women’s and children’s health; and pandemic prevention, preparedness and response. Every year, more than 170 million people benefit from the products it has helped roll out.