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HEALTH:
TRIPS & WHO FURTHER MARGINALISING WORLD'S POOR Geneva,20 Oct 99 -- The advances made by the essential drug policies in many third world countries are threatened by the World Trade Organization's agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) as well as certain policies of the World Health Organization, says a research study. Published in the October issue of 'Corner House', a research and solidarity group based in the U.K., the study titled 'Diseases, Drugs and Donors in the Third World' states that TRIPS has 'grave implications' for many developing countries. Pharmaceutical expenditure accounts for a substantial part of the health budgets of most developing countries. So far, the prices of essential drugs have been kept under control by implementing national drug policies or by manufacturing the drugs themselves. But all that is going to change, the study says. The WTO's TRIPs agreement requires member countries to introduce "product" patents instead of "process" patents. Until now, many developing countries have been able to manufacture a patented drug legally by a process different from that originally used. But for developing countries, implementing the TRIPs "is an invitation to a lethal cocktail of 'higher consumer prices of pharmaceutical drugs; larger foreign exchange outflow as a result of more imports and fewer exports; and fewer people employed as a result of lower domestic production." The study also notes that predictably, the remedies proposed by the Global Forum for Health Research, a WHO-pharmaceutical-aid agency industry collaboration, are state subsidies, guaranteed markets and "streamlined regulatory requirements" for private sector corporations - which would only entrench their power further. Economic globalization, meanwhile, has contributed to the resurgence of some infectious diseases and the emergence of new ones, according to the study. After Thailand's economic collapse, for instance, dengue fever increased because pools of water collected as construction projects were left unfinished, providing a breeding ground for disease-carrying mosquitoes. Malaria's comeback has been helped by the building of large dams and irrigation schemes which increase areas of stagnant waters, and by the movements of migrant workers who bring the pathogen into regions where it previously did not exist. Use of pesticides and synthetic drugs has led to the evolution of resistant strains of mosquitoes and pathogens: far more people die from malaria today than did three decades ago. The study maintains that today's medical research is highly skewed in favour of heart diseases and cancer as compared to other diseases like malaria, cholera, dengue fever and AIDs which kill many more people. Just four per cent of drug research money is devoted to developing new pharmaceuticals specifically for diseases endemic in the South anyway, the study notes. To put it another way, less than 10% of the $56 billion spent each year globally on medical research is aimed at the health problems affecting 90% of the world's population. While pneumonia, diarrhoea, TB and malaria account for more than 20% of the disease burden of the world, they receive less than one per cent of the funds devoted to health research. Even with extended and enforced patent protection in the countries of the South, it is unlikely that Western companies will devote much effort to research which might benefit "financially non-solvent populations". The WHO estimates that between 1,300 and 2,500 million people - more than one-third of the world's population - have little or no access to "essential drugs" -- defined by WHO as those "indispensable" drugs which "should be available at all times, in the proper dosage forms, to all segments of society". What drugs are available are often unsafe, ineffective, or of low quality, the study points out. Many of them have been dumped on the South because they remain unapproved in the West. Some drugs developed in the 1950s and 1960s to treat tropical diseases, on the other hand, have begun to disappear from the market altogether because they are seldom or never used in the developed world. Perhaps the study's most disheartening note is its observation with regard to the on-going controversies in the field of genetic engineering and health. "The role for people in the South in a globalized medical system involving genetic engineering is perhaps less as health beneficiaries than as donors of body parts and cell lines," it maintains. Organs of both dead and live children are already widely sold in Brazil, with the justification that this market alleviates poverty. In Thailand, meanwhile, recent scandals involved the alleged trading in organs of patients who were deliberately allowed to die or were operated on without the consent of relatives, the study adds. (SUNS4534) * Chakravarthi Raghavan is the Chief Editor of the South-North Development Monitor (SUNS) in which the above article first appeared. [c] 1999, SUNS - All rights reserved. May not be reproduced, reprinted or posted to any system or service without specific permission from SUNS. This limitation includes incorporation into a database, distribution via Usenet News, bulletin board systems, mailing lists, print media or broadcast. 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