Health ministers to debate drug patent dispute

By Laura MacInnis

GENEVA (Reuters) - Health ministers from around the world will try next week to bridge differences over how to overhaul drug patent rules that developing countries say make life-saving medicines costly and inaccessible.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has struggled to find a way to encourage the development of effective, affordable medical treatments for parasites and tropical diseases that have long been overlooked by the pharmaceutical industry.

A draft WHO plan proposed two years ago was rejected by both the pharmaceutical sector and poor nations as inadequate, and failing to balance competing claims for lower prices and incentives for developing costly treatments.

An intergovernmental group convened to address those problems failed earlier this month to agree on alternatives to the prevailing patent system that gives companies the exclusive right to sell drugs they develop over a fixed period of time.

WHO spokesman Bill Kean said health ministers attending the United Nations agency's annual World Health Assembly would seek to iron out the disagreements that have impeded progress in the intellectual property field.

"Some of these (differences) we really do think will be sorted out during the WHA," he told a news briefing in Geneva.

Development activists also see the May 19-24 meetings as a critical moment for the drug access issue, which has also been taken up by the World Trade Organization (WTO) in an agreement that makes allowances for developing countries to create or buy copycat versions of patented drugs.

The WTO's Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights or "TRIPS" accord has been criticized as too limited to cope with the problems poor countries face accessing medicines to fight HIV, malaria and other diseases that kill, blind and disable millions of people each year.