[Ip-health] Letter to Editor-Business Standard (India), responding to T.Nelson op-ed

[Suerie Moon]

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The following letter to the editor, from Leena Menghany of MSF (India) and myself,
was published in the Business Standard (India) last week, on May 2, 2008.
Letter to the Editor,
Tim Wilson's article,  'India should celebrate World IP Day', published
by the Business Standard (27 April 2008) asserts several factual errors
regarding trade agreements and misses the point about the important
international negotiations on medical R&D taking place this week in
Geneva.
Innovation is meaningless unless people have access to it.  The patent
system suffers from two key defects: by creating monopolies, patents
allow lifesaving medicines to be marketed at unaffordable prices.  At
the same time, patents fail to stimulate R&D for diseases that
primarily affect the poor.
Every day,
 Medecins Sans Frontieres faces the consequences of the
broken system that Wilson celebrates: key patented medicines for AIDS
treatment are too expensive, and the most commonly used diagnostics
fail to detect TB in a majority of patients. The result: hundreds of
thousands of people die unnecessarily every year.
The Geneva talks have the potential to address these problems by
finding new ways of stimulating the development of medicines, vaccines
and diagnostics, while also ensuring that the developing world will
have access to these urgently needed tools.  One example is the
proposal for a global prize-fund that would reward inventors of new
tools that deliver genuine public health benefits, such as a low-cost,
fast-acting, accurate TB diagnostic.  Such a tool could potentially
benefit millions of people in India, which carries one-third of the
global burden of TB.
Patents are public policy tools
 to create incentives for medical
innovation. When they fail to deliver, we must find other creative and
innovative solutions to ensure that medicines of the future will
address real health needs, and be accessible to those who need them
most.
Leena Menghaney
Project Manager - India
Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines
Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF)
Suerie Moon
Research Fellow, Sustainability Science Program
Center for International Development
Harvard University

___________________________________________

Suerie Moon, MPA

Research Fellow and Doctoral Student

Sustainability Science Program, Center for International Development

Kennedy School of Government

Harvard University

suerie_moon@ksgphd.harvard.edu