Geneva - the job

I haven’t talked about the job yet. As previously said, I work as a press officer in an NGO. Can’t say which one cos they’re not always in favour of uncontrolled blogs and also it doesn’t matter that much. Currently I am working for a campaign that aims to influence national and international policy makers to improve access to treatment and stimulate innovation of new medicines and diagnostic tools for developing countries.

Or an easier to put it is: before 2000, treating someone who was HIV positive cost 10.000 US$ per year. After years of advocacy and negotiations, the price is now around 300US$ per year, still too expensive for the patient but affordable for us, even though we wished it was still cheaper.

Two weeks ago, I participated at the IGWG meeting, the intergovernmental working group on public health, innovation and intellectual property. Intellectual property in the form of patents prevents developing countries to have access to essential medicines. Patents keep the drugs prices artificially high, as one manufacturer keeps a monopoly on the product and can decide of its price. My NGO wants to separate the cost of research and development of the medicine from the price of the drug. We are not against patents; we are against their effect.

The pharmaceutical industry, one of the most lucrative industries in the world, argues that they need the money brought by patents to fund their research. However, of the 1556 new drugs approved between 1975 and 2004, only 21 (1,3%) were specially developed for tropical diseases and TB, which account for 10% of the global disease burden (to read more).

TB is a very good example of how R&D (research and development) needs to be reconsidered. Tuberculosis claims 2 million deaths each year – almost 4 lives every minute – and two billion people (one third of the population) carry the bacilli. Most of them will not develop the disease as it is triggered by a low immune system. But a low immune system is a characteristic in HIV infected people. TB is the number one killer of HIV infected patients. For a couple of years now the TB community has been faced with another problem: resistant strains of TB. “Normal” TB can be cured and the drugs are efficient, though the cure is very long and difficult (up to 8 months), when you live in Belgium where social security is good you can manage; it’s going to be though but manageable. In developing countries where often the choice is between working and bringing food to the table or getting cured, it’s impossible. Resistant strains can only be cured with highly toxic medication with awful side effects, banned years ago because too dangerous. The R&D in TB is scares. Why? Because it’s not a highly profitable disease.

In the West, people infected with TB will rarely develop a resistance because they will get cured easily. In developing countries, patients don’t get diagnosed on time or cannot take their medication properly.

Another example is children infected with HIV. This problem nearly doesn’t appear anymore in the developed countries, as the antenatal care is good, mother are given proper medication and give birth by caesarian to prevent mother-to-child transmission. Therefore research in drugs to cure children infected with the virus have not really been developed. Doctors in our field project used to break adult tablets to give to the children; or they gave syrup that tasted awfully and sometimes even needed refrigeration! After years of advocacy R&D in drugs for infected children is finally getting somewhere.

Patents have been created to protect someone’s invention. You put hard labour into inventing or creating something and as a reward you get a protection for a certain period that prevent anybody to copy your work without permission, acknowledgment or royalties. This also allows the inventor of putting a price on his product. We don’t see how much a drug really costs as with our social security, the government is paying the difference. So a drug that we think costs 10 euro probably costs 10 time more. In countries without social security this has a direct impact to the patients access to drugs.

Patents exist on every single product but they don’t have such a disastrous effect on people as the patents on drugs. Simple example, when Philips invented the CD player, the price was extremely high. Within the next year prices dropped and two years later nearly everyone could afford a CD player. Other companies like Sony, Samsung quickly manufactured their own CD players. But the CD technology has a patent. But Philips was clever enough to put the CD player technology in a patent pool, meaning that everyone who was going to use the CD player technology to copy or improve it would have to pay royalties to Philips. This keeps the research active. This is not what pharmaceutical industries want. Putting the research for neglected and most neglected diseases to a shameful low.