GENEVA - Developing countries desperate to secure cheaper medicines for their
populations, particularly for those suffering infectious diseases, will do
battle in Geneva this week with the United States as the sole holdout against a
developing a more flexible global patent system.
The US is obstructing the ability of the World Health Organization to push for
a more flexible intellectual property system, according to several sources. The
issue is being negotiated this week at the WHO's Intergovernmental Working
Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property (IGWG) at the 61st
annual
United National World Health Assembly in Geneva.
According to the WHO's website, "developing countries remain largely excluded
from the benefits of modern science". IGWG's mandate is "to prepare a global
strategy and plan of action on essential health research to address conditions
affecting developing countries disproportionately."
The general situation remains bleak despite some success stories, Nicoletta
Dentico, from the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi), a non-profit
drug development organization, said at a panel on Access to Medicines organized
by Oxfam on Tuesday.
"The 10/90 gap still remains," she said. The 10/90 gap refers to the developed
countries accounting for 90% of global pharmaceutical sales, whilst accounting
for only 10% of the 14 million plus global deaths occurring annually due to
infectious diseases.
Said Dentico, "When you have nothing except death as the alternative, you may
want to use common sense if a drug should be registered [patented] or not. It
is important to talk about patents, but look at least at the transition phase
at what is lacking in terms of needs."
IGWG was to have already agreed on its plan of action but a consensus has yet
to be achieved on the controversial issue of intellectual property. At issue
for the US is the further dilution of its desired strict intellectual property
system and the interests of its pharmaceutical industry.
"We have some sort of consensus that the WHO should step in and work in the
area of intellectual property [in terms of helping countries push for a more
flexible intellectual property system]," Thailand's lead negotiator, Shripen
Tantives, said at the Access to Medicines panel.
"We think this is a key moment when many countries, developed and developing,
agree that WHO should do something to improve health in the area of IP
[intellectual property]. We have these principles in the draft [plan of
action]. Unfortunately, [complete] consensus is pending because of only one
member. Only one member disagrees with the new role of the WHO."
Tantives, who said she was speaking in her personal capacity, noted that since
the IGWG process began in 2006, "member states had had to make compromises,
which resulted in some diluted text, which will have consequences for the
provisions and implementation in the future."
Noting her dissatisfaction with the current text, Tantives said, that with "we
are not satisfied" with what was now in the IGWG plan of action "because if we
go into the details, we have to compromise, to delete some very substantive
elements."
Ellen 't Hoen of Medecins Sans Frontieres, who spoke at the same panel, said:
"Companies today charge high prices because they have patents. There are two
consequences of this patent system. One, research and development is directed
only where there is a market. Two, access to drugs is horribly expensive."
Patents provide companies a monopoly over their knowledge. "If we finance
research and development independently from access, we may be getting
somewhere."
She described the current system as the "blockbuster model", where
pharmaceutical companies build their operations around a few blockbuster drugs
or drugs that command very high sales. The result is neglect of the diseases
that developing countries' populations suffer from.
"We don't get out of bed if we can't make US$1.5 billion per product [per
annum]. The blockbuster model is not necessarily the way to go."
'T Hoen also said that the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights (TRIPS) and the Public Health Declaration of 2001, where the World Trade
Organization declared that TRIPS should not compromise governments' public
health objectives, "put access firmly on the political agenda". TRIPS is an
international agreement reached in 1994 that sets minimum standards for many
forms of intellectual property regulation.
Since 2001, she said, the prices of first generation anti-retrovirals for HIV,
for example, have come down dramatically. Countries have started issuing
compulsory licenses for production of generic versions of patented drugs, as in
Thailand and Brazil.
However, "progress is confined largely to AIDS-related treatments. What about
other diseases and products? Success is on a case-by-case, drug-by-drug basis,
and is highly dependent on civil society actions."
In the past two years, she said, Thailand had come under considerable political
and economic pressure from the United States after the Southeast Asia country
had issued compulsory licenses for anti-retovirals, and for drugs to fight
cancer and heart disease.
Can the WHO be a major player in correcting the crisis of the current system?
Speaking to Inter Press Service on the sidelines of the panel, Oxfam America's
Rohit Malpani said that "the WHO is an effective counterweight. It provides
advice to developing countries to use safeguards, and it can use its voice to
prevent governments from signing up to higher levels of IP. It can assist
developing countries by providing studies on the public health consequences of
data exclusivity, for example. However, there is resistance from the US."
Malpani said the WTO "has already guaranteed countries the ability to override
patents in certain circumstances. WHO should be able to provide the advice and
technical support. All countries should be able to attain this support. We
should not even have this discussion to begin with."
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