[Ip-health] Dissertation on Access to Medicines and Diagnostics

[Brendan Hickey]

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[ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
> Dissertation on Access to Medicines and Diagnostics
>
>> Duke MD/PhD student Matt DeCamp from the Duke UAEM chapter
>> recently defended a dissertation in Philosophy on access to
>> medicines and diagnostics.  I suspect that this dissertation or at
>> least parts of this current and comprehensive 427-page behemoth
>> would be of interest to many of you.  I've pasted the abstract and
>> table of contents into this message, and I strongly encourage you
>> all to check it out.
>>
>> Full text:  http://dukespace.lib.duke.edu:8080/dspace/bitstream/
>> 10161/193/1/D_DeCamp_Matthew_Wayne_a_052007.pdf
>>
>> GLOBAL HEALTH: A NORMATIVE ANALYSIS OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
>> RIGHTS AND GLOBAL DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE
>>
>> Abstract
>> In the past several years, the impact of intellectual property
>> rights (IPRs) on
>> access to medicines and medical technologies has come under
>> increased scrutiny.
>> Motivating this are highly publicized cases where IPRs appear the
>> threaten access to
>> particular medicines and diagnostics.  As IPRs become globalized,
>> so does the
>> controversy: In 1998, nearly forty pharmaceutical companies filed
>> a lawsuit against
>> South Africa, citing (among other issues) deprivation of
>> intellectual property.  This
>> followed South Africa's implementation of various measures to
>> enable and encourage
>> the use of generic medicines =96 a move that was particularly
>> controversial for the newly
>> available (and still patented) HIV medicines.  While many
>> historical, legal, economic,
>> and policy analyses of these cases and issues exist, few
>> explicitly normative projects
>> have been undertaken.
>>  This thesis utilizes interdisciplinary and explicitly normative
>> philosophical
>> methods to fill this normative void, engaging theoretical work on
>> intellectual property
>> and global distributive justice with each other, and with
>> empirical work on IPR reform.
>> In doing so, it explicitly rejects three mistaken assumptions
>> about the debate over IPRs
>> and access to essential medicines: (i) that this debate reduces to
>> a disagreement about
>> empirical facts; (ii) that intellectual property is normatively
>> justified solely by its ability
>> to "maximize innovation"; and (iii) that this controversy reduces
>> to irresolvable
>> disagreement about global distributive justice.  Calling upon the
>> best contemporary
>> approaches to human rights, it argues that these approaches lend
>> normative weight in
>> favor of reforming IPRs =96 both that they should be reformed, and
>> how =96 to better enable
>> access to essential medicines.  Such reforms might include
>> modifying the present global
>> IPR regime or creating new alternatives to the exclusivity of
>> IPRs, both of which are
>> considered in light of a human right to access to essential
>> medicines.  Future work will
>> be needed, however, to better specify the content of a right to
>> "essential medicines" and
>> determine a fair distribution of the costs of fulfilling it.
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