Will Europe act on Doha pledge to unblock access to life-saving drugs?

Date: 25/07/02

While arguments rage in the EU over intellectual property rights, thousands are dying every day from AIDS in the world's poorest countries. David Cronin reports.

ALMOST 9,000 people perish from AIDS every day - three times the number killed by the two planes that reduced New York's World Trade Center to rubble.

Due to medical advances, Westerners infected with the virus have frequently been able to continue leading active lives. But that option is rarely available in the developing world, where AIDS victims die because they cannot afford treatment.

In Uganda, for example, a monthly dose of two branded drugs, combivir and sustiva, prescribed to AIDS patients as a combination comes to more than l100. The average annual income in the country is only €308.

Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy has committed the EU to working towards making life-saving drugs cheaper and to address complaints by poor states that drug multinationals are using the World Trade Organisation's rules on patents to maintain the often prohibitive prices charged for their products.

Lamy's advisors have been focusing lately on the international trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS) accord.

Outgoing WTO chief Mike Moore has described TRIPS as a 'carefully negotiated balance between providing intellectual property protection - which is essential if new medicines and treatment are to be developed - and allowing countries the flexibility to ensure that treatments reach the world's poorest and most vulnerable people.'

Major drugs manufacturers also contend they need to be able to make profits so that these can be ploughed back into pioneering new treatments. These companies have been eager to enforce their patents. Twenty-three countries in sub-Saharan Africa have four or more anti-retroviral drugs on patent. Between them, these states contain 53 of the world's HIV/AIDS victims.

But Dutch Socialist MEP Dorette Corbey believes the argument about patents ultimately benefiting the poor does not hold up to scrutiny. 'Despite the fact that innovative pharmaceutical companies argue that their patents must be sacrosanct in poor countries for the sake of R&D [research and development], private sector R&D has long neglected the major killers of the development world,' she said.

A recent study Corbey co-wrote with Guido Bakker from aid agency Partners in Health calculates that just 11 of the 1,393 new 'chemical entities' developed in 1975-99 targeted tropical diseases. 'Medicines are simply not developed for the most neglected diseases,' the study says.

In June the TRIPS Council voted that least developed countries (LDCs) should not have to provide patent protection to medicines until 2016. Yet Corbey feels this decision should not only apply to the 49 'poorest of the poor' states officially recognised as LDCs by the United Nations in 2001.

South Africa, for instance, classified as a lower-middle income country, should also be able to avail of it, she argues. It has the highest concentration of HIV and AIDS sufferers in the world - some 4.74 million people.

Another problem is that many poor countries do not have the facilities to manufacture drugs needed to fight AIDS.

A new paper by Oxfam and Save the Children says that TRIPS does not allow the export of affordable generic versions of patented drugs to poor countries which issue a compulsory licence for them but lack the capacity to make them on their own soil.

The charities sent a questionnaire to 11 leading pharmaceutical firms, asking them if they would support the right of LDCs to apply for a compulsory licence for a drug manufactured abroad. Only two replied to that query.

Novartis said: 'In most cases, we are not convinced that access to treatment would actually be increased by compulsory licensing.'

GlaxoSmithKline remarked: 'We do not consider that this issue has in any way contributed to access problems and do not believe that there should be a general right to export.'

Last November's WTO ministerial conference in Doha agreed that a concerted effort should be made to reach a deal ensuring that patents do not prevent poor countries getting access to vital drugs by the end of this year.

The European Commission and the US have both tabled similar proposals to the TRIPS Council on this issue over the past few months. Anti-poverty activists are dismayed that these closely resemble arguments put forward by the drugs industry.

However, Christophe de Callatay, spokesman for the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA), says there has been a 'myopic excessive focus on intellectual property rights' during the debate on AIDS. The patents issue, he says, is not the only one that must be addressed.

Even more importantly, the West has to allocate far greater cash to building better healthcare infrastructures in countries where they are woefully inadequate.

'If someone is to blame, it is not industry,' he said. 'It is the Blairs, Bushes and Chiracs of the planet.'

While arguments rage in the EU over intellectual property rights, thousands are dying every day from AIDS in the world's poorest countries. Article is part of a European Voice survey on pharmaceuticals.