NEW DELHI: Roughly 26 million die suffering every year due to a major gap in access to morphine and other opioids, a new report shows.

The study, conducted by The Lancet Commission on Global Access to Palliative Care and Pain Relief, found that the needs for pain management and palliative care remain unmet in many developing nations.

India — among eight of the largest global populations — was meeting the needs of just four per cent of those requiring pain relief, The Lancet medical journal reported warning of a “global pain crisis”. 
More than 75 per cent of the world’s population lives in countries that provide less than half of the morphine needed for palliative care. 

The crisis can be solved easily through an essential package of palliative care to be made available by health systems worldwide. 
According to the report, the most comprehensive global analysis of palliative care, some 61 million people world over suffer serious physical and psychological suffering and pain each year. 

Of this total, some 83 per cent live in low and middle-income countries where access to low-cost, off-patent morphine is rare or completely unavailable, even though the cost should be pennies a tablet. 

The annual burden in days of severe physical and psychological suffering is huge — six billion days worldwide, 80 per cent in the low and middle-income countries, according to The Lancet Commission on Global Access to Palliative Care and Pain Relief, which studied this health issue for three years. 

Of the 298.5 metric tonne of oral morphine distributed worldwide, only 10.8 metric tonne, 3.6 per cent, go to low and middle-income countries. 

“The pain gap is a massive global health emergency which has been ignored, except in rich countries,” an official statement quoting Felicia Knaul, chair of The Lancet Commission and Professor at the Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami, said. 

This global pain crisis has relief too! 

The Lancet Commission calls for an essential package of palliative care to be made available by health systems worldwide.At the centre of the essential package is immediate release, oral and injectable morphine. 

In high-income countries, a pain-relieving dose costs three cents per 10 mg. In the low-income nations, the same morphine cost 16 cents where and when it is available.