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WHO Commission: patents harm health
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Drug eradication: The limits of „alternative development“
07/2006
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[ Medicines ]
WHO Commission: patents harm health
The World Health Organisation (WHO) is going to set up a working group to investigate how to improve developing countries’ access to urgently required medicines. The group will draw up an action plan with clear guidelines and priorities, with the aim of gearing pharmaceutical research throughout the world more towards the needs of poor countries. This was decided by the WHO General Assembly in Geneva at the end of May. The working group will be made up of governmental representatives and regional organisations. Health experts and representatives from non-governmental organisations will also be invited to the meetings.
The resolution arose from an initiative by Brazil and Kenya, based on a report by an international commission. It had investigated, on behalf of the WHO, how international patent protection impacts on public health in developing countries. The experts, chaired by Ruth Dreifuss, a former president of Switzerland, concluded that patents only serve as a driving force for efficiency and innovation if two conditions are met: First, there have to be competing companies that have the capital and capacity to conduct pharmaceutical research. Second, customers must be in a position to pay the normally higher monopoly prices for patented medicines.
Most developing countries do not meet these conditions. For them, patent protection does not lead to innovation and better products, but simply causes many patients to be excluded from access to treatment. The commission is therefore in favour of interpreting the international rules on patents in a manner that does not impede poor countries’ access to medicines. Accordingly, companies should avoid patenting their products in poor countries, governments must not be deprived of the opportunity to issue compulsory licences, and rich nations such as the USA should refrain from striving for patent protection clauses that go beyond multilateral WTO agreements in bilateral trade talks (see D+C/E+Z 6/2006, p. 224). The Commission appealed to developing countries to cut tariffs and taxes on the import and trade of medicines.
From the Commission’s point of view, intellectual property protection is no incentive for the international pharma industry to research diseases such as malaria or tuberculosis, which mainly afflict poor countries, in greater depth. The purchasing power in these regions is low, which means developing new drugs is not profitable. Therefore, public research must be increased and new forms of cooperation between actors from the private sector, governments and civil society should be explored.
The Commission’s priority concern is not for “neglected diseases” but rather “neglected people”. After all, the people of developing countries do not only suffer from typical “poverty diseases”. They increasingly suffer from non-communicable diseases such as cancer, diabetes or heart diseases, too. In Asia and Latin America, such afflictions are already more wide-spread than communicable diseases (see graph). Effective methods of prevention and treatment are hard to access in developing countries; in other cases, they do not suit the local conditions. While global initiatives to fight communicable or infectious diseases like AIDS, malaria or TB have been set in motion in recent years, the report claims that poor countries have no instruments to bear “the other half of their double burden – chronic noncommunicable diseases.” (ell)
On the internet:
The report of the WHO expert commission:
http://www.who.int/intellectualproperty/en/
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