Healthy Skepticism Library item: 7016

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: media release

Countries initiate discussions on public health, innovation and intellectual property
WHO 2006 Dec 8

Abstract:

At a global meeting of Governments convened by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 4-8 December, countries opened discussions on best ways to boost research into medicines and other health products for diseases disproportionately affecting the poor, and the relationship between intellectual property and public health.

The Inter-Governmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property was established by WHO in response to a World Health Assembly resolution in May this year. The resolution, which followed an independent report by the WHO Commission on Intellectual Property and Public Health, took stock of the fact that current medical research and development often do not address the needs of developing countries and that even when products exist poor populations struggle to access them.

Delegates from more than 100 countries and experts from civil society and academia discussed eight principal elements:
prioritizing research and development needs; promoting research and development; transfer of technology; management of intellectual property; improving delivery and access; ensuring sustainable financing mechanisms; establishing monitoring and reporting systems. These elements will form the basis of negotiations towards a global strategy and plan of action at the next meeting of the Inter-Governmental Group.

The Group will convene again in 2007 to finalize the global strategy and plan of action, which will be presented to the World Health Assembly in May 2008. Work will continue in the coming months. In addition, the Secretariat on Public health, Innovation and Intellectual Property will maintain an open forum for Member States and other stakeholders through web discussions.

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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