Produção Nacional
Revisado por pares
Acesso a medicamentos: impasse entre a saúde e o comércio!
2017; Escola Nacional de Saúde Pública, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz; Volume: 33; Issue: 9 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1590/0102-311x00123117
ISSN1678-4464
AutoresJorge Antonio Zepeda Bermudez,
Tópico(s)Health Systems, Economic Evaluations, Quality of Life
ResumoThe importance of medicines for access to health has drawn growing attention since the Conference held by the World Health Organization in 1985, consolidating the notion of access to medicines as a central component of primary care 1 .Thirty years later, a Commission was established to assess the impact of essential medicines on universal healthcare coverage, discussed in the sphere of the World Health Organization 2 .And we repeat familiar questions: what has changed in these three decades, and why do we continue to face the same issues and engage in the same struggle?Year after year, access to medicines and the clash been health and trade are repeated in all the global health forums.The World Health Assembly has discussed the issue every year for the last two decades.The World Trade Organization (WTO) TRIPS Agreement (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) signed by all the member states in 1995, the Millennium Declaration with the Millennium Development Goals in the year 2000, and the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health, also in 2000, assigned even greater importance to this confrontation 2,3 .Facing heavy resistance, the 70th World Health Assembly in May 2017 indirectly included on its agenda the discussion on access to medicines and proved particularly reluctant to discuss the Report of the United Nations Secretary-General's High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines 3 .The issue was only addressed timidly on the agenda of the World Health Assembly (http://www.who.int/gb/e/e_who70.html,accessed on 18/Jul/2017), avoiding the approval of resolutions or decisions that implicitly mentioned the High-Level Panel, only including it in more general discussions.From the global health perspective, we feel it is essential to discuss the reasons for this resistance by a United Nations agency responsible for coordinating activities in the field of public health.The resistance, displayed by a large share of the WHO Secretariat, responds to pressure by large countries and donors, who have repeatedly attempted to prevent the WHO from addressing sensitive issues, especially those related to intellectual property and the clash between health and trade.The current innovation and intellectual property system clearly assigns privilege to individual rights over collective rights and fails to prioritize access to health as a fundamental human right 4,5,6,7 .Such denial by the WHO runs counter to the other United Nations agencies, where all the recent forums have featured this issue on their agendas and in their events. Access to medicines: a dead-lock between health and trade!Acesso a medicamentos: impasse entre a saúde e o comércio!Acceso a los medicamentos: ¡el estancamiento entre la salud y el comercio!
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