Access to medicines and international issues
Investing for life: meeting poor people’s needs for access to medicines through responsible business practices
The shortcomings of the pharmaceutical industry in increasing access to medicines
Authors:
; Oxfam
Publisher:
Oxfam, 2007
Access to medicines is fundamental for people to achieve their right to health. This Oxfam paper points out that the challenge to ensure that millions of poor people can get the medicines they need remains huge, given the appearance of new diseases; the re-emergence of ‘old’ diseases; the threat of pandemics; and the growing burden of non-communicable diseases in developing countries.
Current pharmaceutical industry approaches do not address the problem sufficiently. Major shortcomings include:
- their failure to implement systematic, transparent, tiered-pricing mechanisms for medicines to poor people in developing countries
- lack of research and development to address the dearth of dedicated products for diseases that predominantly affect poor people in developing countries
- persistent inflexibility on intellectual property protection, and in some cases, active lobbying for stricter patent rules and legal challenges to governments’ use of TRIPS public health safeguards
- too heavy a focus on donations, which are unpredictable and can cause chaos in the market for low-cost medicines
The paper argues that there is potential for pharmaceutical companies to contribute more substantially and effectively towards increasing access to medicines for poor people in developing countries. This is yet to be achieved because their approaches have been ad-hoc, and they have failed to deliver sustainable solutions or adopt appropriate strategies. Oxfam recommends that the industry must put access to medicines at the health of its decision-making and practices. This is both a more sustainable long-term business strategy and would allow the industry to better play its role in achieving the universal right to health.
