The World Health Organisation’s 193 member states on Saturday overcame their deep divisions over intellectual property rules and endorsed a strategy to help improve developing-country access to drugs and medical tests.
At the United Nations agency’s annual policy-setting meeting in Geneva, governments also called for WHO director general Margaret Chan to finalise a plan of action boosting incentives for drugmakers to tackle diseases that afflict the poor.
”The WHO has taken a big step forward to change the way we think about innovation and access to medicines,” said James Love of the advocacy group Knowledge Ecology International.
”In a lengthy and substantive document, the World Health Assembly has reached consensus on a plethora of difficult and important topics, sometimes with impressive detail and clarity, on topics that were considered controversial only a short time ago,” Love said.
Some issues, including how new incentives would be financed, were not resolved in the intense negotiations capping the week-long World Health Assembly summit, which also analysed international responses to infectious and chronic diseases, climate change, and counterfeit drugs.
The intellectual property resolution requests that Chan, who succeeded Lee Jong-wook as WHO chief in 2006, ”finalise urgently the outstanding components of the plan of actions, including time-frames, progress indications and estimated funding needs”. That plan will be reviewed at the World Health Assembly in 2009.
Access
Intellectual property lies at the cross-section of business, development, and health issues, and the WHO’s membership has been split over about how and whether to revamp the patenting system, which critics argue make drugs unaffordable to many. Two years ago, the WHO’s member states set up a working group to assess research and development shortfalls in health, and ways to ensure more poor people can access the life-saving drugs, diagnostic tests and medical equipment they need.
Stark differences in opinion between rich and poor countries on issues including the fairness of patents blocked consensus in that working group, whose ”draft global strategy on public health, innovation and intellectual property” was adopted by WHO members on Saturday.
Developing countries say pharmaceutical companies now spend large sums to create treatments that wealthy consumers will spend money on — such as remedies for baldness or acne — while overlooking deadly parasites and tropical diseases that kill, blind and disable millions of impoverished people each year.
The drug access issue has also been taken up by the World Trade Organisation in an agreement that makes some allowances for developing countries to create or buy copycat versions of patented drugs.
But the WTO’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights or ”Trips” accord has been criticised as too limited to cope with the problems poor countries face accessing medicines.
The United States and other rich nations have resisted a wholesale reform of prevailing intellectual property rules in health, which afford companies the exclusive right to sell drugs they develop for a fixed period.
The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, whose members include Pfizer, Novartis and Merck, has called strong intellectual property rules a precondition for continued health innovation. – Reuters 2008