[afro-nets] Doha trade agreement failing to improve access to medicines, Oxfam says

["Claudio Schuftan" <claudio@hcmc.netnam.vn>]

Doha trade agreement failing to improve access to medicines, Oxfam says
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Last month two US politicians who will be powerful committee chairmen in the new Democrat-controlled congress requested an investigation of the effects of US trade policy on public health from the Government Accountability Office. Senator Edward Kennedy and Rep. Henry Waxman called for the US to drop pressure on WHO to bury a report on trade and health critical of US policies.

Rep. Waxman said: “Administration trade agreements have numerous provisions that threaten access to affordable medicine. We have to recognise that the Bush administration’s single-minded pursuit of intellectual property protections for drug companies can have potentially devastating consequences for the public health in developing countries.”

But James Love of the Consumer Project on Technology points to one country that has devised a fairly succesful process for exporting medicines under the 2003 Cancun agreement – India.

But, he notes, India is able to export most medicines because they are not yet patented, and the real test will only come when patent applications for newer products have been processed. India is currently in a transitional phase from a patent regime which explicitly blocked patent protection for medicines towards one which is TRIPS-compliant.  From 2005 the country was required to accept the patenting of medicines, and some Indian manufacturers are nervous that tightening of the country’s patent regime will eventually remove the ability to make newer antiretroviral products.

But national laws still often fail to fully exploit the flexibilities of the TRIPS Agreement, says James Love. Little or no assistance to exploit the TRIPS flexibilities is coming from the World Health Organization, and the agency is woefully under-resourced to help developing countries improve access to the essential medicines that are contained on WHO’s Essential Medicines list.

He proposes that national governments, health advocates and the UN system now need to look at another approach: patent pools for developing countries which identify all the patents on essential medicines necessary for treating particular diseases, and take the burden of voluntary licensing away from manufacturers by seeking standard terms for voluntary licenses across the developing world. The pool would also create a smoother system for drawing down generic drugs from manufacturers, advocates claim, although the means for achieving this remain to be specified (follow this link for a description of the proposed scope of a patent pool).

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2001 Doha trade agreement failing to improve access to medicines, Oxfam says 

Keith Alcorn, Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Public health exemptions from world trade agreements negotiated five years ago have had no significant impact on improving access to medicines in developing countries, Oxfam said today in a report Patents versus Patients.

Oxfam argues that since 2001, no country has been able to take full advantage of the public health safeguards built into international agreements on patents. 

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Bala
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