Financial Times
May 23 2003

  Health campaigners yester-day criticised a US attempt to enlist World Health Organisation support for stronger patent protection for medicines, claiming it would push up drug prices in poor countries.

A US resolution to the WHO annual assembly that opened in Geneva this week urged members to promote pharmaceutical research and development by boosting incentives for industry, including better patent and data protection. New medicines, vaccines and diagnostics accounted for 40 per cent of the increase in life expectancy between 1986 and 2000, the US claimed.

However, campaign groups such as Mˇdecins sans Fronti¸res (MSF) and Oxfam say patents have little or no impact on research into diseases of the poor, an argument backed by the UK's expert commission on intellectual property rights. In its report last year it concluded that intellectual property (IP) "hardly plays any role at all" in stimulating research, except for diseases with a large market in the industrialised world.

"Of the 1,393 new drugs approved between 1975 and 1999, only 16 (or just over 1 per cent) were specifically developed for tropical diseases and tuberculosis, diseases that account for 11.4 per cent of the global disease burden," 10 non-governmental groups said,accusing the US of "an almost blind belief in the IP system".

The US resolution stands little chance of success at the assembly as most of the WHO's 192 members are developing countries. But opponents have been dismayed that the resolution makes no reference to negotiations in the World Trade Organisation to allow poor nations to import generic copies of patented drugs in case of need.

"The US has broken every promise made concerning developing countries' right to access low-cost generic medicines. . . and is using the world health assembly to champion monopoly protections on life-saving drugs," Brook Baker, of US-based Health GAP, said yesterday.

The WTO talks have been stalled since the US blocked a deal in December. Harvey Bale, director-general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Associations, said yesterday the patent-based industry saw the December deal as a "licence to steal".

MSF said poor countries were granting more patents on medicines than necessary under WTO rules because they lacked the expertise to judge whether a patent application was justified.