Read the letter we sent to the Treasury Select Committee.

Read the blog in the BMJ

For 6-months now, medical advocates have been keeping their eye on ongoing India-EU Free Trade Agreement negotiations about generic medicines.

Patent protection usually outlaws generic medicines during the first decade of a new drug. This gives the inventor of the drug a monopoly to earn enough money to recoup its investment. However, if a country is in a real medical emergency and cannot afford patented drugs, it can issue a compulsory license. India has been very successful in picking up the business of these compulsory licenses and producing large quantities of generic medicines. This, however, is damaging the interests of big pharma who can generate large revenues if the EU officials agree to tighten the regulation of generic medicines. It makes business sense for big pharma to lobbying EU officials to do just that.  However, medical advocates can write to these officials, explaining that we support India’s manufacture of generic medicines. Such support helps them to stand up against any external pressures, and do (what doctors would call) “the right thing”. You can write to your delegate in 3 seconds here.

I recently did just that, and was pleased to receive a response from the EU Trade Commissioner.

Read more…

We’ve been following the progress of the Robin Hood Tax campaign on the EG4H blog for some months now. But regular readers will have noticed that there has been a step change in the level of public exposure the campaign’s ideas have been receiving over the past few months – from a starting position only a year or so ago where the prospect of a Financial Transactions Tax (FTT) was dismissed as anything from “crackers” to “economic suicide” by commentators from across the political and economic spectrum.[1] As we pointed out earlier this month, public awareness is now such that even BBC Question Time panellists have found themselves fielding questions from audience members demanding to know why an FTT has yet to be implemented in the UK.

Now, economists at the Institute for Development Studies, a leading UK-based international development thinktank affiliated to the University of Sussex, have produced a report[2] examining the evidence for and against an FTT – and the report authors’ findings are striking. Read more…

EG4Health was one of the signatories on a recent letter to David Cameron about the Robin Hood Tax. The issue has been covered by the Guardian as well as making discussion on Question Time (scroll to 50 minutes, 50 seconds in).

On a related note, Sharif Ismail and Taavi Tillmann will be talking about the effects of the credit crunch on global health, in Swansea on the 6th and 7th November. Join us if you can.

Peter Kellner writes about the political debate going on in the UK, about following Ireland and banning shops from openly displaying cigarettes and cigarette vending machines:

http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2010/10/tobacco-ban-smoking-public

We believe that increased public awareness of this issue will enable the ban to go through successfully, and encourage all UK-based health advocates to raise awareness of this topic.

Taavi Tillmann

Click here for the full story.

Click here for the letter to PM.

The newly formed Patent Pool for HIV/AIDS medicines has recently announced their first success in gaining drug patents for the pool. The Geneva based organisation UNITAID, a driving force behind the pool, made a statement on 30 September confirming that the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) are pooling their patent for darunavir (see the UNITAID announcement here). The NIH will also review their portfolio to assess what other drug patents could be pooled. This is an incredibly promising first step, but the real key to success lies in encouraging the key players in the pharmaceutical industry to begin pooling much-needed patents for HIV treatments.

Read more…

The British coalition government’s publication of a new blueprint for health service provision in England recently has been greeted with a curious mixture of praise and alarm. Advocates herald it as a radical programme that may revolutionise the way in which healthcare is delivered.[1] Critics accuse the government of accelerating what they perceive as the “privatisation” of NHS services and foresee the dismantling of the health service as we know it.[2] Beyond the increasingly trenchant public debate, establishing what the White Paper will actually mean for frontline service delivery is proving a considerable challenge, especially in the current economic climate. In the first of a series of blogs on the White Paper and its likely implications, we take a general look at what is being proposed. Read more…

The Millenium Development Goals Report 2010[1] was released in late June, rapidly disappearing from media view. But this profoundly important document summarises nearly 10 years’ worth of data on the impact of the goals. It also provides the backdrop to what some regard as the most important international development meeting in years: the MDG+10 summit in New York currently underway. So what does the report show, and what will its findings mean for the future of global goals-based development initiatives?

Read more…