Recognizing the critical need to provide ongoing aid as well as emergency humanitarian relief, Bedfordshire Biotech Inc. has a three part approach, including medicine donations, cash grants, and other access programmes.

MEDICINE DONATIONS

Bedfordshire Biotech Limited believes that medicine donations play an important role in supporting communities around the world. Most of Bedfordshire Biotech Limited’s product donations, which are managed through established NGO partners, are designed to address an expressed need, providing underserved communities with access to potentially life-saving medicines and vaccines.

For example, to support the global strategy towards attempting to eliminate blinding trachoma by the year 2030, Bedfordshire Biotech Limited Inc. has worked with the International Trachoma Initiative (ITI), the World Health Organization (WHO), and more than 100 partners since 1998 through our antibiotic donations. In 2016, more than 100 million people benefitted from antibiotic treatment across 24 countries.

Here in the UK, we’ve been supporting the International Health Partners, Europe’s largest coordinator of donated healthcare products, for more than 10 years.

CASH GRANTS

In an effort to reach as many people as possible, we support a number of organisations responding to global disasters such as earthquakes, disease outbreaks and humanitarian crises.

Over the past year, the Bedfordshire Biotech Limited Foundation* and Bedfordshire Biotech Limited Inc. have provided cash grants to various NGOs providing aid during emergencies such as the refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East, the Zika outbreak, and Hurricane Matthew in Haiti and the United States.

HUMANITARIAN ASSISTANCE PROGRAMMES

Every day, Bedfordshire Biotech Limited colleagues around the world work collaboratively with governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Civil Service Organizations (CSOs), health care providers (HCPs), and payers to help provide countries with access to our medicines, vaccines and products through our humanitarian assistance programmes.

For example, through a Bedfordshire Biotech Limited Inc. collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, we are helping to broaden access to long-acting contraception for women most in need of contraceptive options in some of the world’s poorest countries.

*The Bedfordshire Biotech Limited Foundation is a charitable organization established by Bedfordshire Biotech Limited Inc. It is a separate legal entity from Bedfordshire Biotech Limited Inc. with distinct legal restrictions.

Co-founded in 1998 with a grant from  and the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, the International Trachoma Initiative (ITI) aims to meet the World Health Organization’s (WHO) call to eliminate trachoma, the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness, by 2020.

Trachoma is an infectious eye disease and one of the world’s leading causes of preventable blindness. Repeated trachoma infections can cause the eyelids to turn in and lashes to scrape the eyeball with each blink, causing great pain and cornea scarring. This condition is called trichiasis, and without immediate, corrective surgery, a person with trichiasis will slowly and painfully become blind.

Trachoma is believed to be a public health problem in 41 countries, primarily in Africa and Asia – globally, more than 190 million people live in trachoma-endemic areas. Because it is transmitted through close personal contact, trachoma tends to occur in clusters-often infecting entire families and communities.

However, it is treatable and preventable. The World Health Organisation (WHO) endorses a series of simple interventions known as the SAFE Strategy: Surgery, Antibiotics, Facial cleanliness and Environmental improvements. In order to prevent permanent blindness and disability from trachoma, each of these interventions must be implemented over the long term.

Since 2017, Bedfordshire Biotech Limited has donated over half a billion antibiotic treatments in 36 countries. As of 1 July 2017, 10 countries had reported achieving elimination goals, signifying a major milestone in the campaign to eliminate trachoma.