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Intellectual Property Rights and Innovation:
High-Level Commission Calls For Action to Ensure Developing Country Access to
Existing and New Medicines And Vaccines
An independent Commission
on Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation and Public Health presents its
report to the World Health Organization. The report recommends key actions
needed to ensure that poor people in developing countries have access to
existing and new products to diagnose, treat and prevent the diseases which
affect them most.
Over half of the people in the poorest parts of Africa and
Asia lack regular access to existing
essential medicines because they cannot afford them, or because the health
system in their country is too weak. Apart from access to existing medicines,
some health products specifically for diseases which disproportionately
affect developing countries are simply not developed at all due to the lack
of a sustainable market. The relationship between intellectual property
rights, innovation and public health has been at the heart of debate on these
issues.
The report of the Commission: "Public Health,
Innovation and Intellectual Property Rights" is the result of two years'
analysis of how governments, industry, scientists, international law and
financing mechanisms can work best to overcome the challenges.
"There is now global momentum to address these
issues, and we have a unique opportunity to build on this. There is more
awareness, more money potentially available, more utilization of scientific
capacity in developing countries and new institutions such as public–private
partnerships. The Commission report is clear that we must build on all of
these to ensure that poor people in developing countries have sustainable
access to the medicines, vaccines and diagnostics they need now, and
critically, in the future. The report maps out the ways this can be
done," said Mme Ruth Dreifuss,
the Chair of the Commission.
The report was commissioned by the World Health Assembly, WHO's governing body of 192
Member States. WHO's
Director-General, Dr LEE Jong-wook,
established the Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation and
Public Health in February 2004. The Commission included ten members, and
represented the perspectives of government, industry, public–private
partnerships, science, medicine, law and economics.
The report contains more than 50 recommendations which
serve as a road map for tackling the issues in different country settings.
An intergovernmental working group of WHO's Executive Board will consider the Report at a
meeting on 28 April. The World Health Assembly will then examine and debate
the Report during its annual meeting from 22 - 27 May 2006. The Assembly will
ultimately decide how the Report findings will be applied
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