Professor of Pharmacology Joan Ramon Laporte, Doctor Mercedes Zurita (Puerta de Hierro University Hospital), the Association of Victims of Thalidomide in Spain (AVITE), the journalist Oriol Güell (El País), the International Civil Organization No Gracias and journalist Manuel Rico, from the European coalition Investigate Europe, received the prize Association for Equitable Access to Medicines Award (AAJM).
The event, which took place at the Town Hall of Noblejas (Toledo), was chaired by its mayor, Agustín Jiménez Crespo, and the president of the AAJM, Soledad Cabezón. During this, many expressions of support were expressed for the victims of DANA, both from the autonomous community of Valencia and from Castile-La Mancha. Juan José Rodríguez Sendin, doctor from Noblejas and former president of the AAJM, also participated. The president of the Collegiate Medical Organization. Tomás Cobo sent a video encouraging the work of the AAJM.
Agustín Jiménez expressed his gratitude to the AAJM for returning to Noblejas as the framework for these awards and to the government delegate in Castile-La Mancha, Milagros Tolón, for his participation. In his speech he spoke of disease and povertytwo situations – he declared – whose alliance is not a coincidence because “the disease is caused by the lack of resources, hunger and the deficiencies of a health system insufficient in human and therapeutic resources including the progressive loss of response capacity – he declared – we must not continue to tolerate.
“This is why,” he added, “we support the Association for Fair Access to Medicines, because we believe that only well-informed and motivated citizens will be able to change a situation that causes the greatest morbidity and mortality in the world as well as the maldistribution of wealth and poverty. , but be it also accomplices.”
Soledad Cabezón, president of the AAJM, thanked the City Hall of Noblejas, in particular its mayor, for its “clear social commitment in favor of the health of citizens” and its support for the AAJM in “this just demand to guarantee the right to access to health through access to medicines.
After congratulating the winners, Soledad Cabezón explained that a third of the world’s population does not have the possibility of obtaining essential medicines and that More than 10 million people die every year because they don’t have access to it.. He questioned the high prices of new medicines which “have increased in recent decades to the point of becoming unaffordable for many European citizens and seriously threaten the sustainability of national health systems”, as well as current pharmaceutical policy, ” one of the most important sectors. lucrative in the world, which is only an economic model devoid of ethics.
Juan José Rodríguez Sendín, doctor of Noblejas for 36 years, former president of the WTO and one of the promoters of the AAJM, appreciated these awards with “we want to promote – he said – citizen sensitivity in the defense of medicine as a good, preferential human right to which all must have access under equitable conditions” and thanked the mayor of Noblejas for his involvement in this cause and in the defense of health care.
Rodríguez Sendín spoke of “the increase in social inequalities that occurs,” he said, “by limiting the capacity of the health system to improve health.” And, after questioning “useless treatments and technologies in cases and in patients for which they are not indicated” that the national health system suffers due to the “behavior of health governments and interests contrary to the “patient’s interest”, he argued for the doctor’s duty to “adapt his actions and decisions exclusively to the patient’s health needs”.
