Jerremy is a PhD-student from Maastricht UMC+, the Netherlands and is a Board member of UAEM Europe. Over the past 5 years, he has come face to face with the crisis of access to medicines at several levels: from patient level to research, from politics to campaigns. 

What struck Jerremy most when he was abroad, were the times that doctors could not give patients the medicines they urgently needed because the hospital could not pay for it, leading to life-threatening situations. Imagine that your life-saving medicine is in the building next to you, but you have no key to unlock the doors and you can only buy a key if you pay more than three times your annual salary?

Nowadays, new medicines are often brought to market with very high prices, creating a barrier for many patients to actually receive the medicines they need. This matters for people living in poverty, but also increasingly for people in rich countries like the Netherlands and Germany. The actual situation is even worse, because medicines are mainly developed where profit is highest, leaving behind poverty-associated and tropical diseases that affect millions of sick people worldwide.

Jerremy made a promise to himself : the current biomedical research and development system must change. It should be a patient centered system rather than profit driven,  we are talking about lives here! A system does not change automatically and will not happen in a day, so UAEM's student volunteers do great work worldwide to campaign in multiple areas and levels throughout the year. They advocate at universities, discuss with ministries, educate (future) researchers and debate with panels.

You are also part of the solution! Spread the message if you believe this problem should be solved, talk with others about the situation. Recognition of the problem is the first step, a very important one. Thank you for your support, keep spreading the word about UAEM

"Let’s make medicine for people, not for profit!"