Air – it’s our most basic need. It’s far more vital than water, food, or medicine. People can survive just minutes without its most important component: oxygen.
But in much of the world, people struggling to breathe lack access to medical oxygen, a treatment that makes the difference between life and death. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the problem and made it exponentially worse.
“I will never forget the images,” Leith Greenslade, coordinator of the Every Breath Counts coalition, tells us on the One World, One Health podcast. “Patients suffocating to death as hospitals ran out of oxygen.”
A team at the University of Washington estimates that 25 million people die every year of both acute and chronic conditions that need treatment with medical oxygen.
“It’s unclear exactly how many of the estimated seven million COVID-19 deaths could have been prevented with adequate supplies of medical oxygen, but a study of COVID-19 deaths in African intensive care units found that half of patients died without ever receiving it,” Greenslade and the One Health Trust’s Ramanan Laxminarayan wrote in a recent article. “Shamefully, world leaders have turned a blind eye to the lack of access to medical oxygen.”
Listen as Leith explains the scope of the problem and the possible solutions in this episode of One World, One Health.