Global Campaign Vows to Fight Corporate Drug Monopoly

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Global Campaign Vows to Fight Corporate Drug Monopoly
by Marwaan Macan-Markar


BANGKOK - Public health and HIV/AIDS activists from the developing world are seeking to break the monopoly over drugs held by pharmaceutical giants through a new global campaign designed to influence international debate over the issue.

Formulated at the end of a three-day meeting, last week, which brought some 200 participants from 20 countries to the Thai capital, the campaign seeks ‘’a new way out of the current patent system; one that will encourage innovation of new drugs and access for all,” says Kannikar Kijtiwatchakul, an organiser of the International Conference on Compulsory Licensing: Innovation and Access for All. ‘’What we have now is innovation controlled by the pharmaceutical industry that lets them have a monopoly on drugs.”

The conference participants — who came from countries such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Cambodia, the United States and hosts Thailand — have a meeting at the World Health Organisation (WHO) in January 2008 as the first target of the new campaign.

At that meeting the Geneva-based health agency’s executive board may receive a draft of a plan to find a compromise between the demands of big pharma, which produces patent-brand drugs, and the world’s poor, who have little or no access to the available life-saving medication due to high prices.

The proposed plan is being drafted by the WHO’s Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property (IGWG), which held a second round of discussions in early November. ‘’Our campaign wants to add to the IGWG’s work, because we want to get our views heard at the January meeting,” Kannikar told IPS.

‘’At the heart of the plan is finding an optimal way to boost research and development of affordable healthcare products so people, particularly in the developing countries, can receive treatment for diseases, with an emphasis on neglected conditions including tuberculosis, malaria and HIV/AIDS,” states a background note by Intellectual Property Watch, a Geneva-based on-line publication, distributed at the conference.

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http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/26/5439/