How Do Patents and Economic Policies Affect Access to Essential Medicines in Developing Countries?
- Topics:
- Pharmeceuticals
- Tags:
- Developing Country,
- Healthcare,
- Medicine,
- Microsoft Access,
- Patent,
- Project HOPE,
- Public Health
- Source:
- Project HOPE
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Overview: This paper studies the relationship between patents and access to essential medicines. It finds that in sixty-five low- and middle-income countries, where four billion people live, patenting is rare for 319 products on the World Health Organization's Model List of Essential Medicines. Only seventeen essential medicines are patentable, although usually not actually patented, so that overall patent incidence is low (1.4 percent) and concentrated in larger markets. This and other results shed light on the policy dialogue among public health activists, the pharmaceutical industry, and governments that is often based on mistaken premises about how patents affect corporate revenues or the health of the world's poorest.
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Format: PDF | Size: 252KB | Date: Jun 2004 | Pages: 12
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