Essential Medicines News

The recent publicity surrounding the supposed “ethical pharmaceutical” scheme announced by scientists in London has been met with skepticism in many parts of the world.

Access to even basic medicines in India remains unacceptably low. Children go without routine vaccinations. Simple off-patent anti-infectives are unavailable to the majority of the rural poor. Despite pumping out cheap generic AIDS drugs for years, a paltry 12000 of India’s 5-million AIDS sufferers were getting the drugs at the end of last year.

For the Indian poor, the price of drugs is not the issue. The real issue is the state of their health-care infrastructure. The government-run system is a shambles, riddled with inefficiency and corruption and lacking resources. The transport network is so bad that rural people struggle to get to a clinic, if there is one. Meanwhile, dirty water and cooking fuels exact a terrible toll of disease on the poor.

What people need are hospitals, clinics, doctors and nurses. Without them, you can give drugs away for free and they still won’t get to the most needy.

Activists’ fixation with patents and prices only harms patients. Over-hyped schemes such as “ethical pharmaceuticals” take energy and discussion away from the things that really matter, such as infrastructure, doctors, nurses, water management and indoor air pollution. Without improvements there, people will go on dying from easily preventable diseases which already have cheap cures.

As for prices, out of 18 comparable AIDS drugs named by Doctors Without Borders in an attack on patents, 14 patented drugs sell below or near the cost of the off-patent generics. Last July, the head of the World Health Organisation’s AIDS division said: “It is very obvious … that the elephant in the room is not the current price of drugs. The real obstacle is the fragility of the health systems.’