life-saving drugs are not products to merely fetch commercial gains. Also, pharmaceutical firms have an important social role, writes AKANSHA MEHTA
About 14 million people die every year from infectious diseases, many of which are curable and preventable, such as acute respiratory infections, diarrhoeal diseases, malaria and tuberculosis. The death toll is unacceptably high especially in developing nations. This health crisis is largely due to the lack of economic accessibility of life-saving medicines. Many life-saving drugs are also beyond the reach of the common man. For example, the cost of drug used for the treatment of bone cancer costs £2,375 for one dose and £1,14,000 for a full course of 48 doses, making it extremely unaffordable.
High prices of such drugs and medicines can be attributed to the patenting system which allows the drugs companies to gain a monopoly over the production and marketing of pharmaceutical products and processes, permitting them to fix prices at high rates to maximise profits. Patent rights are extended around the world through the provisions of WTO agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights which is based on the presumption that patents and other intellectual property rights are highly imperative to encourage innovation and research. Yet, there is scant evidence to prove that the introduction of TRIPS-compliant framework of IPR protection has ensured transfer of technology, research & development and innovation in developing countries, especially in context of life-saving medicines and human health.
What IPR protection has ensured is that poor patients give their entire life’s savings to pharmaceutical companies to buy their treatments to save their lives. The pharmaceutical industry has built its profit systems around obscure set of intellectual property controls, creating a commercial hegemony to capitalise human miseries. In the garb of protecting their IPR, these multinational brands hold poor patients hostage to market forces. It amounts to denying known cures to a large part of humanity for commercial consideration and letting the public health remain degraded on a global scale. The struggle to access life-saving medicines presents a legal and ethical minefield for rich and poor countries alike — one that is needed to be fought out by the common man by challenging pharmaceutical corporations over intellectual property rights.
This raises pertinent questions about global health equity. When the laws of trade and commerce override the human right to life-saving medicines, can society protect public health from unbridled private marketsIJ In today's time when the idea of life saving medicine as a social good is eclipsed by the commodification of health, is the IPR regime enough to protect people's right to lifeIJ Nothing can be more dehumanising than equating human life with commercial commodity. Corporate houses should not be allowed to trade inhuman life.
life-saving drugs ought to be treated as public good rather than private property. This idea can be realised through the democratisation of pharmaceutical production systems. One option is to have a global patent pool which is based on a system of free exchange of research without the traditional proprietary restrictions. This would safeguard public access to scientific discoveries and technologies that could be used for developing treatments.
Another research model proposed to the World Health Organisation by Bangladesh, Barbados, Bolivia, and Suriname in 2009 was a centralised innovation fund, which would pool research and develop treatments like antibiotics and vaccines aimed at serving vulnerable communities. For HIV/AIDS drug development, the Medicines Patent Pool, based in Switzerland and funded by the United Nations, has already established a global knowledge-sharing platform to expand production of low-cost medicines.
Therefore, the ultimate solution will be nationalising the entire pharmaceutical industry involved in research & development of life saving drugs. Whether Governments the world over have the courage, political will and moral strength to take such a bold step, remains a moot question.
(The writer is a student at RMl National law University, lucknow)