Good morning. Thank you for inviting us to be here to present to your committee.
I'd first like to thank MP Raj Saini for all the incredible work that he and his office have done to bring this study to light. I really appreciate it.
It's many years that I've been working on issues of access to medicines. I was involved with Canada's access to medicines regime back in 2002-2003 and was slightly disappointed to see that it actually never really took ground. I think we need to find new ways to try to get at these issues and make sure we address the issues of access to medicines here in Canada.
My background is that I've been working with Médecins Sans Frontières for 25 years. I am an international board member of Médecins sans frontières. I am also a professor at McGill University in international development, and I was actually the founding president of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, which is a global student group trying to make sure that their universities fulfill their social missions, specifically in regard to biomedical research and development.
I've lived and worked in many countries throughout the world where people are not able to access the drugs they need.
My first experience with MSF was in Rwanda during the genocide, where I had to watch people die because they could not afford HIV/AIDS medicines in that country. At that time, the drugs cost $10,000 per patient per year. I've also seen children who die of malaria in Congo because the medicines they have are no longer effective and no one was interested in creating better drugs. I've also watched children in Bolivia suffer from Chagas disease because there was no market interest in the drugs that those children needed.
What we know today is that one in three people in the world cannot access basic essential medicines. Many of these people are suffering and dying absolutely needlessly just because they cannot access the drugs they need.
These are all signs that the system, the model, that we have currently just simply does not work. Even here in Canada, we're watching as our Inuit populations are suffering from 300 times the rate of tuberculosis over and above that of the non-indigenous Canadian-born population.
This national crisis that we have here in Canada today around tuberculosis is also reflecting a global crisis that we have around tuberculosis: a global crisis that is killing two million people per year. People with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis today are dying because they do not have access to the treatment they need.
The treatment that exists is over 63 years old, requiring 14,000 pills and multiple injections, which leave one in two people deaf. This is the treatment that most people with multidrug-resistant TB are using today. There is a new drug, an amazing new drug that could really change things, but it's just too expensive; it's out of reach for most of those people.
Why is this happening? As Jason just very clearly laid out, this is happening because the current model that we have, the biomedical research and development model—or the R and D model, as we like to call it—is simply not fit for the purpose. It's failing patients globally. It's failing patients here in Canada. Even the United Nations, on many, many occasions, has made it extremely clear that we need to do this differently. We've been talking about this at the United Nations level since the early 2000s, if not before.
We can do it differently. What's really interesting is that at Universities Allied for Essential Medicines we did a study of all the alternative research and development models that are out there. We found 81. What Jason mentioned—DNDi—is just one of those models, but there are many of them. We know that we can do it. It's just a matter of giving these models the space, the financing and the ability to be able to do what they know they can do. There are ways to do it that are different from what we do today.
What we want to do today—and I'm going to this pass over to my colleague Louise—is propose a practical model that could be part of a new approach to biomedical R and D and that UAEM has been working on for over 10 years now.