Patent rights vs patient rights: intellectual property, pharmaceutical companies and access to treatment for people livi
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There are two main factors hampering access to treatment in Sub-Saharan Africa – one is the inadequate infrastructure; the other is the price of those medicines, which are guarded under international patent law and the patents to these drugs are held by six big pharmaceutical companies.5 Over the past two years several positive developments have allowed for a greater availability of drugs in the developing world. Following the increasing production of generic ARVs by companies in India, Thailand and Brazil and a high-profile campaign to lower the cost of these medicines, prices have fallen by an average of 90% in the developing world. However, for the least developed countries in Africa with a per capita income of $300, many of which are hardest hit, this price is still too high. At the recent World Trade Organisation talks in Doha, the right of developing countries to ignore intellectual property law in favour of the public health of their population was reaffirmed in a declaration that many would have regarded impossible only a year ago. The World Bank is now offering grants for countries to finance ARVs for their population and the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria will make even more money available for treatment. These developments have shifted the focus from the pharmaceutical companies onto other issues. These include the failing health-care systems in many African nations, the lack of political leadership in fighting the epidemic, the social and
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1 UNAIDS Epidemic Update December 2001, www.unaids.org. 2 UNICEF data for 1999 quoted in the Economist, 11th May 2002 Special report on AIDS in southern Africa. 3 These drugs are taken as a combination of three different medicines, therefore also known as Triple therapy or Combination therapy. 4 UNAIDS Press Release, 2nd July 2002. 5 Merck, Bristol– Myers–Squibb, Roche, GlaxoSmithKline, Abott and BoehringerIngelheim produce ARVs and hold patents. For two drugs Stavudine and Zalcitabine the patents are held by Yale University and the US Government, respectively. (MSF Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines; Accessing ARVs: Untangling the Web of Price Reductions for Developing Countries; October 2001.
6 Michal Specter, ‘Annals of Medicine’, The New Yorker Magazine, 17th December 2001.
7 ‘Costs of scalingup priority health interventions in low and selected middle income countries: methodologies and estimates’, L. Kumaranayake, C. Kurowski and Conteh, Commission for Macroeconomics and Health; Working Group Five Discussion Paper No. 19; 2001. 8 There are additional arguments that the drugs allow people to work and produce and therefore add more to the GDP than the cost of their treatment. 9 In many cases it appears that treatment helps prevention efforts by removing stigma, which is one of the main obstacles to HIV/AIDS. The Brazilian government, by tackling the issue head on and providing treatment, has removed a large part of the stigma surrounding HIV/ AIDS that hampered prevention efforts. 10 The mai
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