Right to health

Novartis endorses the right to health. While states hold comprehensive responsibility to respect, protect and fulfill their people’s health needs, we believe that each sphere of society – from government and charitable organizations, to medical professionals and business – has a role to play in support of the right to health.

Health is a fundamental human right, indispensable for the exercise of other human rights. The right to health is set out in Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and specified in Article 12 of the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which states that every human being is entitled to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health conducive to living a life in dignity.

The right to health includes healthcare and the underlying pre-conditions to health, such as safe drinking water, sanitation, food, housing, environment, occupational health and health-related information. Enforcing it is not just about the cost of treatment and medication, however. Even free provision of drugs would not resolve the substantial infrastructural challenges facing inadequate healthcare systems. For this, international, multi-sectoral cooperation is crucial.

As a leading manufacturer of pharmaceuticals, the right to health is of particular importance to us. Global health challenges such as aligning research priorities with the needs of people living in poverty, improving access to medicines and conducting clinical trials among poor populations call for new business approaches, which we are actively exploring.

Novartis has invested significant effort into analyzing what the right to health means in terms of access to treatment and appropriate healthcare, particularly for poor people in developing countries. Through public-private partnerships, we are engaged in preferential pricing systems, such as providing Coartem® to the World Health Organization (WHO) at cost in order to treat malaria patients in the poorest countries.

Novartis also engages in pro-bono research into diseases with particularly devastating effects in the developing world. The Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases (NITD), for example, is currently researching new drugs for the treatment of dengue fever, malaria and tuberculosis.

The Novartis Vaccines Institute for Global Health (NVGH), meanwhile, is a not-for-profit research institute, established in 2007, dedicated to the translational research and development of vaccines. NVGH’s first project aims to develop a broad-range enteric vaccine for Salmonella infections at the root of much diarrheal diseases. According to the WHO and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), an estimated four billion cases of diarrhea occur worldwide ever year, resulting in more than 2 million deaths, mostly among children under the age of five in developing countries.

Through the efforts of the Novartis Foundation for Sustainable Development, Novartis is also helping improve the quality of diagnoses and treatment for poor people in developing countries by training healthcare workers, ensuring the provision of adequate facilities and by setting up a health insurance scheme or social marketing campaign aimed at changing attitudes toward health. The Foundation was also instrumental in developing innovative approaches for psycho-social support of AIDS-orphans and is currently engaged in developing a telemedicine project in close cooperation with the United Nations’ Millennium Villages Project. These innovative projects are based on a proof-of-concept approach, with the aim that larger donors will adopt them and scale them up.

Learn more on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Learn more on the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

Visit the World Health Organization (WHO) website

Visit the Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases (NITD)

Learn more on the Novartis Foundation for Sustainable Development

Download Novartis position on the right to health
(231 KB)

Download the article in the Journal of Business Ethics
(145 KB)

 

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