If you live in a third world or, worse, an impoverished country, you may be used to getting not the best services in everything. You live along or just a little above the poverty line and you seek to find solutions to problems like food and basic human necessities on a daily basis. You can’t even afford to get sick.

Apparently, this situation is about to worsen. A recent study of the Laurens Niens’ team at Erasmus University Rotterdam showed that tens of millions of people in low and middle income countries would be pushed below the poverty line by buying common but vital medicines.

The drugs studied were a salbutamol inhaler, used for the management of asthma, glibenclamide, a common diabetes drug, atenolol, which belongs to a drug class commonly known as beta-blockers and is used to treat high blood pressure, and amoxicillin, a broad spectrum antibiotic. These medicines, at present, are already unaffordable to hundreds of millions.

According to a Reuters report, the team analyzed the number of people who would be pushed below an income level of $1.25 or $2 a day – poverty indicators used by the World Bank – by paying for four important, widely used medicines.

The Dutch researchers, whose work was published in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) Medicine journal on Tuesday, said their findings showed that greater effort is needed to encourage the use of cheaper generic drugs in poor countries and to ensure more medicines are made available through the public sector.

In the Philippines, five common but expensive medicines were put under price regulation in 2009 by the Malacañang through Executive Order 821.

These drugs included antihypertensive drug amlodipine, anti-cholesterol drug atorvastatin, the antibiotic/antibacterial drug azithromycin, and the antineoplastics/anticancer drugs cytarabine and doxorubicin.

EO 821 is aided by Republic Act No. 9502, known as the “Universally Accessible Cheaper and Quality Medicines Act” or simply the Cheaper Medicines Act, which gives the Department of Health (DoH) the power to impose hefty administrative fines and penalties on any person, manufacturer, importer, trader, distributor, wholesaler, retailer or any other entity who violates the maximum retail price.

Senior citizens in the country are also given a 20 percent discount and exemption from paying the value-added tax from medicines through the Expanded Senior Citizens Act of 2010.

But even with a few exceptions, millions of Filipinos may still be pushed below the poverty line as predicted by the study, considering that the Philippines belongs to a number of middle income countries and has a struggling health care system. (With a report from Reuters)