[Ip-health] Straights Times editorial - Proftis of Misfortune

[Mike Palmedo]

http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/commentary/story/0,4386,167608,00.html


Profits of misfortune
Straights Times
Jan 21, 2003

WHILE the richer parts of the world are fixated on security and weapons
of mass destruction, the poorest regions have no security from epidemics
of mass destruction. It is not just HIV/Aids, which now colours half the
world red two decades since humankind learnt about the virus. Malaria
would not go away because a vaccine is hard to develop, and tuberculosis
is making a comeback. These three ailments of the wildfire variety
account for 13,000 deaths daily in the least-developed and developing
countries, according to one estimate. Crucially, this is an issue of
prevention and control with affordable drugs, although research to stop
HIV and malaria in their tracks continues. The HIV drug cocktail costs
US$300 (S$520) a year per patient if generic versions are used, but
brand-name ones cost 10 times that amount. This is the great divide
between commerce and morality. The longer it persists, the harm done in
economic and security terms will be far more real than the politicised
threat of offensive weapons. The shame of it all is that pharmaceutical
companies abetted by governments preach a false compassion: While they
acknowledge they have a humane duty to not block reasonable access to
generics, it always is more tempting to preserve the huge earnings. The
biggest American drug firms had profits last year of US$37 billion, a
return of 39 per cent.

Last month, talks at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to codify a 1994
agreement on exceptions to drug patents - the basis for permitting
generics to be manufactured and sold without infringing on WTO rules -
collapsed on an objection by the United States. All the other nations,
143 of them, were in favour. Another attempt is being made next month to
bridge differences. But the hurdles have to be forbidding if noted
relief organisations campaigning for generics, such as Oxfam and Doctors
Without Borders, are not hopeful of success. This is no time to give up.
The US and its drug giants should not be given an easy ride. The US
objection rests on an interpretation that the 1994 intellectual property
agreement, later adopted by the WTO ministers at their Doha round in
2001, can be extended to allow makers of generics to produce copies for
too many conditions which are not life-threatening. Diabetes, heart
disease and asthma are cited as examples. Also at issue is the framework
within which developing countries able to make drugs - examples are
India, Thailand, Brazil and Argentina - may manufacture and export
generics.

American drug firms and the US government have had to yield before. In
2001, actions against South Africa and Brazil over generics were
withdrawn under international pressure. The firms had given misleading
data on research costs; the defendants showed much of the enabling work
behind Aids drugs had been done by universities and the US National
Institutes of Health. A compromise in the current impasse is still
possible. But the principle of equity to give due weight to the
interests of patent holders should be observed, and exceptions to
public-health afflictions for which generics are not absolutely
necessary agreed upon. The risk of failure is a free-for-all, whereby
individual governments simply give their pharmaceutical sector the
go-ahead to produce generics and export to any country that needs them.
This will entangle these nations in messy disputes with the US and
patent holders, with the WTO caught in the middle. It should be avoided,
but the rent seekers have to be willing to give up a little.

--
Mike Palmedo
Consumer Project on Technology
T-202-387-8030
F-703-409-7211
mpalmedo@cptech.org