WASHINGTON - Just two days after the Bush administration delighted delegates at the World Health Assembly's annual meeting in Geneva by signing on to a global tobacco control treaty, Washington's delegation came under strong attack from health and development groups Wednesday for preparing a resolution favoring big pharmaceutical companies.

The resolution, reportedly leaked to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) attending the meeting asserts that strengthening patents--known as 'intellectual property (IP) protection'--is the best way to spur investments in research and development (R&D) for new drugs that are desperately needed in poor countries.

In a joint statement issued by Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Health Global Access Project (HealthGAP), the anti-AIDS group ACT UP, and Oxfam, the NGOs charged that adoption of the resolution would contradict "the emerging global consensus that the current system of IP protection is failing to stimulate R&D for disease of the poor."

"The proposals contained in this draft are based on an almost blind belief in the IP system, without regard for the reality for patients in desperate need of newer, more effective health technologies and access to existing essential medicines," the four groups said.

In view of the HIV/AIDS crisis and the difficult problems poor countries face in providing access to antiretroviral medicines and other life-sustaining drugs that can fight diseases common in poor countries, the groups said, "this text gives the impression that the U.S. has lost touch with reality."

The leak comes in the opening days of the WHA meeting (May 19-28) where member governments will decide on the main policy priorities of the World Health Organisation (WHO). Among the major items on this year's agenda are HIV/AIDS, the threats posed by the new SARS virus, and the tobacco control treaty.

In addition, the WHA will elect J.W. Lee, a South Korean doctor, a senior WHO official, to replace former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Brundtland as the new director general of a key UN agency that gained much greater prominence under Brundtland's leadership, and due to the increased global attention paid to HIV/AIDS and other emerging health threats.

The WHO has also played a key role as a forum for trying to reconcile the IP rights of pharmaceutical companies and the needs of poor people for life-saving medicines, in part by devising schemes to offer incentives to companies for developing and distributing drugs to poor people suffering from diseases--such as tuberculosis, malaria, dengue, and certain kinds of hepatitis--that are becoming particularly widespread in developing countries.

Numerous studies have shown not only that poor countries often cannot afford to buy these drugs from Western pharmaceutical companies, but also that the companies fail to develop medicines to treat Third World diseases--precisely because it is unlikely they will make enough money to compensate for the tens of millions of dollars in R&D costs.

Of 1,393 new drugs approved between 1975 and 1999, only 16--a little over one percent--were specifically developed for tropical diseases and tuberculosis, although these diseases represent more than 11 percent of the global disease burden, according to a WHO study.

That record, according to the NGOs, suggests that the IP protection system favored by pharmaceutical companies has simply failed to provide adequate incentives for the major drug manufacturers to develop the needed drugs.

A study commissioned by the British government las year concluded that "presence or absence of IP protection in developing countries is of, at best, secondary importance in generating incentives for research directed to diseases prevalent in developing countries." It also concluded that IP protection actually hampered access to existing medicines because it increases drug prices and makes it difficult or impossible for generic drug-producers to compete.

Health activists thought they had achieved a major breakthrough on the issue at the World Trade Organisation's (WTO) ministerial meeting at Doha, Qatar in November 2001, when the U.S.--which had previously backed the pharmaceutical companies' position on the importance of retaining IP protection--agreed to sign a declaration that WTO patent rules should not prevent member countries from taking measures to protect public health. Washington also agreed to loosen IP protections to permit companies in developing countries that produce generic drugs for their domestic populations to export them to other poor countries.

The pharmaceutical companies, which contributed more than US$50 million to Republicans in the 2002 elections, according to the Wall Street Journal, fought against those concessions back in Washington. As a result the administration now insists that the Doha concessions were meant to apply only to those drugs used in the treatment of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria.

"The U.S. has broken every promise made concerning developing countries' rights to access low-cost generic medicines," said Health GAP's Brook Baker, who said Thompson's draft is simply the latest indication that the administration is backtracking from the Doha commitments.

"Responding to the pharmaceutical industry's insatiable drive for profits, Thompson is using the World Health Assembly to champion monopoly protections on life-saving drugs," Baker charged.

©2003 OneWorld.net

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