[Pharm-policy] Harvey Bale's testimony on US Senate Hearing on AIDS in Africa

[Thiru Balasubramaniam]

This is the url for Dr. Harvey E. Bale Jr.'s testimony (Feb 24, 2000)
before the Senate on AIDS in Africa.  Dr. Bale is the Director-General
of International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufactuerers
Associations (IFPMA).

Thiru Balasubramaniam

http://www.ifpma.org/pdfifpma/Testimony-Feb24.pdf

This excerpt discusses cost and price issues as they relate to the AIDS
crisis.

<SNIP>

"Cost and Price Issues 

How important are price and cost issues? We firmly believe that they are
secondary or tertiary problems in Africa compared to those discussed
above. Some have charged that patents for pharmaceutical products reduce
access to these products. This focus on patents (and prices) ignores the
complexity of the access to healthcare issue and prevents policy-makers
from considering real solutions to this issue. This is recognized by
patient groups and public-sector decision-makers alike. For example, the
European Coalition of Positive People publicly stated with regard to
HIV/AIDS drugs recently that focusing on patent protection and pricing
is  simplistic and fails to take into account the serious practical
problems that need to be addressed&  Drugs could be free and still not
be appropriately used without adequate health care systems. In fact,
they would rapidly become ineffective. The cost of drugs to patients in
Africa is determined principally by distribution, infrastructure,
training and other factors discussed above. The issues of patents and
prices of AIDS drugs are not the key issues. 

Approaching the access issue solely through debates over price is not
only simplistic, as noted above, but also factually incorrect. Patents
do not, in fact, have an influence on access to the drugs, which the
population in developing countries actually consumes. These are
primarily off-patent drugs; for example, almost all of the products on
the WHO Essential Drug List are off-patent. Furthermore, many developing
countries do not currently have TRIPS-compliant intellectual property
legislation and the poorest of these countries will not be required to
implement such legislation until 2005, perhaps even later if they apply
for a longer transition period. Therefore, access to the drugs for which
this population is looking is not inhibited by patent protection.
Indeed, developing countries without effective patent protection have
already started producing their own versions of patented AIDS products,
including India and Brazil."