UNIVERSITY COALITIONS for GLOBAL HEALTH

Hi everyone!

I finally have some good news!. The second round of negotiations of the Intergovernmental Working Group for Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property (IGWG) has started! This is where the Ministries of Health and World Health Organization (WHO) are tasked with coming up with a plan of action that addresses the problems to access to medicines – like the high cost of drugs and the lack of R&D into diseases that mostly affect the poor. Michel Lotrowska, Campaigner at MSF’s Access to Essential Medicines Campaign reports:

“We are getting a sense that countries are pushing WHO to be more active in resolving the access to medicines crisis, and take a pro-health approach to intellectual property. And governments are taking steps to address the fundamental reasons why investment into innovation for diseases of the poor is lacking.”

At the core of the plan is finding an optimal way to increase research and development of affordable health care products so people, particularly in developing countries, can get treatment, with an emphasis on neglected diseases and tuberculosis, malaria and HIV/AIDS.

Why does this matter? This growing pro-access sentiment is a huge step in the right direction. If the WHO comes out against the unfair free trade policies and patent laws of governments like the U.S., it would be the first major international organization to actively seek resolution to these issues. For years developing nations have been trying to find ways around the intellectual property laws and trade practices that ban the creation of generic medicines and support research and development into diseases that only effect the Western world (because they are the “market”). To learn more about the IGWG and access to medicines check out the work of Essential Action’s Access to Medicines Project.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Access to Medicines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.