Drugs for poor countries
I posted Thursday on the agreement this week to alter trade rules to make it easier for poor countries to access pharmaceutical drugs, here: "Drug availability for poor countries" Peter Gallagher posted Friday on the implications of the agreement. Gallagher provides some short, readable background, placing the agreement in the context of international patent protection treaties. He concludes that, really, this shouldn't have been a big deal:
- "In truth, it's not much of a public health problem at all. More than 90% of the drugs on the World Health Organization's list of essential public health medicines are not patented anywhere. Of the others, some are not patented in e.g. African countries. Most are already available under preferential pricing arrangements (typically free) between the global drugs companies and governments of poor countries.
"The legal conflict in the TRIPS Agreement, too, is pretty small beer. You can probably think of a couple of sentences that could be added to the TRIPS Agreement to work around specific problems with a small number of patented drugs without undermining the global patent system.
"So why the agony? The real problems appear to have been ideological NGO's who have been pressing exaggerated claims about the public health consequences of the patents and a legalistic approach by the officials and lawyers advising the drug companies that seemed to exaggerate the threat to the companies' global interests
"Most of the negotiators at WTO in Geneva share the general incredulity that this basically simple issue was not solved a year ago. Let's hope it's now behind us."
Comments