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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 1311

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

Koppel N.
U.S. Drops its Demand for List of Diseases Covered by Drugs Agreement
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2003 Jun 24


Full text:

The United States made a crucial concession Sunday in World Trade Organization discussions to ensure that poor nations can afford patented drugs to treat diseases like HIV/AIDS and malaria. A senior U.S. official said Washington no longer is insisting that a WTO agreement to allow the importation of cheap, generic copies of drugs should be limited to a list of specified diseases.

WTO rules allow countries facing public health crises to override patents and order their drugs from cheaper, generic suppliers. But they can only order from domestic manufacturers, which is of no use for the majority of poor nations that have no pharmaceutical industries.

An agreement that would have allowed imports of generic drugs in certain circumstances collapsed late last year when the United States, under pressure from major drug companies, refused to accept it, despite agreement by all other WTO members. One of Washington’s biggest concerns was that the provision would be used to treat almost any medical condition, from diabetes to impotence.

The United States alternatively proposed a list of entirely infectious diseases to be covered, mostly diseases affecting sub-Saharan Africa. Developing countries rejected this, claiming the list was too restrictive. Many developing countries have said they will not accept other WTO agreements until the drugs issue is settled.

While the industry sees it as appropriate for countries to use compulsory licensing and even importation to meet health needs, they want to be sure that countries do not abuse that as a way of promot[ing] the commercial interests of generic industries,” the official said. Producers also want to ensure that such cheap generic drugs do not end up in industrialized countries’ markets, he added. The official said the United States still is in discussion with drug company bosses, and he was hopeful that the issue would be settled by WTO’s September ministerial meeting in Cancun, Mexico.

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909