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Copyright 1999 InterPress Service, all rights reserved.
Worldwide distribution via the APC networks.
*** 02-Dec-99 ***
Title: HEALTH-TRADE: WTO Urged to Address Access to Medicine
By Danielle Knight
SEATTLE, Dec. 2 (IPS) - Public health advocates and consumer
groups want the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to address the lack
of access to life-saving medicines in the developing world.
They warned delegates to the WTO's third ministerial conference
here that unnecessary trade or patent barriers for essential
medical products - which keep drug costs high in many developing
countries - has led to an increase of preventable illness and
death.
Reliance on the free-market to provide patients in developing
countries who have little relative buying power has led to a
public health crisis, according to the non-governmental groups.
''International trade regulation of essential health care goods
merits a new approach in which public interest is the key motive
rather than commercial interest,'' said an open letter from
Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), Health Action International and
the Consumer Project on Technology.
MSF ("Doctors Without Borders"), the latest recipient of the
Nobel Peace Prize, pushed the WTO delegates to create a "Standing
Working Group on Access to Medicines."
The working group would review issues concerning patent rules
as they relate to access to medicines by involving both the
activities of the World Health Organisation and the WTO's Council
on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights or
TRIPS.
More than 90 percent of all death and illness from infectious
diseases occurred in developing countries, according to MSF.
About 33 million people worldwide were living with HIV/AIDS -
the vast majority of them in developing nations - and 7-8 million
people around the world had active tuberculosis, it added.
''Life-saving medicines are available but they are too
expensive, due in large part to patent protection,'' said Bernard
Pecoul, director of the group's Access to Essential Medicines
Campaign.
He said that many of the patients the international
humanitarian organisation treats were dying because of lack of
research and development for neglected diseases.
''This market failure is a public health crisis...the WTO must
take the lead to ensure that trade of essential medicines is
regulated in the interest of public health,'' Pecoul said.
''As delegates of the WTO, we want you to recognize your
political responsibility in guaranteeing that public health takes
priority over trade,'' he told the WTO's 135 member states.
Pecoul, while not questioning the importance of patents in
stimulating research and developing, insisted that a new balance
between protecting intellectual property and assuring the rights
of individuals to access to medicines ''must be found.''
''People with AIDS-related meningitis in Kenya are dying because
the price of the only effective treatment is beyond their means,''
he said. Patents on the drugs keeps their price high.
For example, fluconazole, the drug used to treat this illness,
cost 20 dollars per day in Kenya, where it protected by patents,
compared to just US 70 cents per day in Thailand, where it is not
patent protected.
In Siberian prisons, 22 percent of patients infected with multi-
drug resistance tuberculosis were dying because they had no
access to expensive ''second-line'' TB treatments, Pecoul said.
At current inflated prices, second-line treatment cost between
5,000-8,000 dollars per patient, he said. ''Again, companies are
using patents to maintain inflated prices.''
Health advocacy groups praised US President Bill Clinton's
promise, made to WTO delegates on Wednesday, to loosen the US grip
on medical patents to make ''desperately-needed drugs'' available
to developing countries.
''The United States will implement its health care and trade
policies in a manner that ensures that people in the poorest
countries won't have to go without medicine they so desperately
need,'' Clinton said in a speech to mark World AIDS Day.
The Clinton administration previously had endured heavy criticism
from AIDS activists over its clashes with South Africa, where
local manufacturers sought to make inexpensive generic versions of
AIDS drugs or to import US medicines at lower prices from third
countries.
And the lack of access to existing drugs because of high costs
was not the only problem, said non-governmental organisations.
Often if pharmaceutical companies will not be able to make a
profit off of a certain medicine because it mainly effects the
poor in developing countries, they will stop production and
distribution of the drug or they will not invest in research on
medicines for certain illnesses, like Malaria, the groups said.
''Market forces alone are not enough to stimulate research and
development for neglected diseases,'' said Pecoul.
While pharmaceutical companies currently poured money into such
non-essential items as diet pills, a lucrative market for life-
saving drugs simply does not exist.
Out of 1,233 new drugs brought onto the market worldwide
between 1975 and 1997, only 13 were for tropical diseases, Pecoul
noted.
In Uganda and Sudan, for example, patients suffering from
'sleeping sickness', a fatal neurological disease endemic in
Africa, had no access to the life-saving drug, DFMO, since
production had abandoned by the manufacturer because it did not
offer enough financial return.
''We cannot and will not ignore this,'' said Pecoul. ''Our
patients our dying, not because their diseases are incurable, but
because as consumers, they do not provide a viable market for
pharmaceutical products.'' (END/IPS/dk/mk/99) .
Origin: ROMAWAS/HEALTH-TRADE/
----
[c] 1999, InterPress Third World News Agency (IPS)
All rights reserved
May not be reproduced, reprinted or posted to any system or
service outside of the APC networks, without specific
permission from IPS.
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