Drug Patents Are Beside the Point
This week Switzerland will become ground zero for the future of health policy in Africa. The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) intergovernmental working group is meeting in Geneva to discuss public health, medical innovation and intellectual property.
Many participants are expected to express their support for efforts to undermine patent protections for drugs. In doing so, however, these attendees ignore the more fundamental problem facing poor African nations — dilapidated healthcare infrastructure.
The anti-patent crowd believes that patents keep prices high and drugs out of the reach of the poor. It blames pharmaceutical firms for the suffering of the impoverished and calls on developing nations to employ patent-revoking compulsory licences that encourage the production of cheaper generics.
But even if medicine were available for free, as it often is in poor nations, dysfunctional institutions and personnel ensure that the needy can’t access it.
Despite unprecedented quantities of monetary aid to the ministries of health of many African countries, health systems on the continent have languished. Between 1990 and 2005 development assistance for health increased from $2,5-billion to more than $13-billion. Overall about 10% of Africa’s healthcare expenditure is financed by donor aid.
And yet more than 50% of Africans lack access to essential medicines, according to the WHO. Around the world more than 10-million children in developing countries die unnecessarily from diseases that are easily preventable and cheap to treat, such as diarrhoea, measles and malaria. Furthermore, up to 80% of Africans have to pay for treatment from their own pockets. In short, public health systems are failing to deliver.
Read the rest of this article on drug patents in Africa.
