Items tagged with Global health

Don't trade away our health (post)

JAN. 30, 2015 - A secretive group met behind closed doors in New York this week. What they decided may lead to higher drug prices for you and hundreds of millions around the world.

In 21st century no one should die for lack of access to medicines, participants at UN forum say (post)

Last week’s 2015 Social Forum led by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) called for urgent action to facilitate access to medicines. In particular, the functioning of the intellectual property system was put into question. A number of recommendations were drawn by the secretariat after having been identified by participants.

TRIPS in question during social forum discussion on access to medicines (post)

Intellectual property rights are hindering access to medicines by maintaining monopolies and high prices, according to speakers at an annual United Nations forum on human rights last week. Flexibilities enshrined in the World Trade Organization intellectual property agreement are hampered by political and economical pressure, they said, and a new system should be devised for pharmaceutical products.

New quiet initiative to improve drug access in middle-income countries, change country classification system (post)

This week a confidential high-level expert meeting was convened in Geneva to start work on a potential change in the country classification used by global health actors to remedy the growing problem of access to medicines in middle-income countries.

Global health partners begin building a new approach to ensure equitable access to medicines (post)

Global health partners met in Geneva to begin the process of building a new approach to better determine health needs and constraints and addressing them in countries.

Global pandemic of fake medicines poses urgent risk, scientists say (post)

Poor quality medicines are a real and urgent threat that could undermine decades of successful efforts to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, according to the editors of a collection of journal articles published today. Scientists report up to 41 percent of specimens failed to meet quality standards in global studies of about 17,000 drug samples. Among the collection is an article describing the discovery of falsified and substandard malaria drugs that caused an estimated 122,350 deaths in African children in 2013. Other studies identified poor quality antibiotics, which may harm health and increase antimicrobial resistance. However, new methodologies are being developed to detect problem drugs at the point of purchase and show some promise, scientists say.

MSF and DNDi join call for a biomedical research and development fund and mechanism to meet pressing global health needs (post)

A group of renowned global health experts*, including from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi), are calling for the creation of a global health research and development (R&D) fund and mechanism to address deadly gaps in innovation for emerging infectious diseases such as Ebola, anti-microbial resistance, and a host of other diseases that have been neglected by the pharmaceutical market. The call comes at a time when these and other public health challenges are high on political agendas in the lead up to World Health Assembly next week and the G7 Summit in June.

amfAR: Issue brief: Trans-Pacific Partnership: Curbing access to medicines now and in the future (May 2015) (post)

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is currently being negotiated among 12 Pacific Rim countries: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam. If passed, it will become the largest U.S. free trade agreement (FTA) in history. It is anticipated that the agreement will expand existing intellectual property (IP) protections on pharmaceutical products, which will ultimately impede access to affordable generic medicines for diseases such as HIV/AIDS, cancer, tuberculosis, and hepatitis C. 

White House publishes several documents related to G7 Summit discussions (post)

The Trans-Pacific Partnership — is it bad for your health? (post)

International trade deals once focused primarily on tariffs. As a result, they had little direct effect on health, and health experts could reasonably leave their details to trade professionals. Not so today.