#Pharma backs latest attempt at a global health #R&D_treaty : Spoonful of Medicine
http://blogs.nature.com/spoonful/2012/05/pharma-backs-latest-attempt-at-a-global-health-rd-treaty-2.html
“Now that it’s about funding, governments have to start talking to each other.”
Importantly, big pharma appears to be on-board—which may pave the way for successful passage of the treaty at next week’s World Health Assembly. “We’re hearing from industry a need to reform the current system,” says CEWG chair John-Arne Røttingen, a health economist at the University of Oslo’s Institute for Health and Society who coauthored the report. Similar proposals were put forward by coalitions of member states and non-governmental organizations in 2005 and 2009, but both efforts failed to even make it to a vote after drug companies lobbied hard against proposed patent reforms that would have opened the door to more generics for a wide variety of medicines. In contrast, the current draft treaty only calls for less patent protection of treatments for diseases commonly found in the developing world, such as #malaria, #Chagas disease and #dengue fever.
