PHA-Exchange> Doha trade agreement failing to improve access to medicines, Oxfam says

[Claudio]

From: "Bala" <bala at haiap.org>
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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http://www.aidsmap.com/en/news/32E9675E-B18A-4841-8947-BDDC37AD42DD.asp?type=preview

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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.