{"id":32438,"date":"2016-09-24T09:44:39","date_gmt":"2016-09-24T07:44:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.times.mw\/?p=32438"},"modified":"2016-09-24T09:44:40","modified_gmt":"2016-09-24T07:44:40","slug":"malawi-can-tackle-drug-access-via-generics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/2016\/09\/24\/malawi-can-tackle-drug-access-via-generics\/","title":{"rendered":"Malawi can tackle drug access \u2013 via generics"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a country like Malawi, stock outs of essential medicines and the presence of counterfeit drugs on the market pose a serious risk to people\u2019s lives. Now a collection of civil society organisations are demanding not only accountability and transparency in the access to medicines but also Malawi to latch on provisions for manufacturing of generic drugs. Dingaan Mithi <\/em>reports <\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cAs a platform we want to ensure equitable access to affordable medicines that are also of good quality, the role of the forum is to play a role as a watchdog in Malawi to make sure health facilities have all required essential medicines.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the word from Safari Mbewe, chairperson of the Consumers Action Forum, a grouping of CSOs lobbying government to improve equitable and affordable medicines.<\/p>\n

The Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (Osisa) recently approved funding to Aids Accountability International (AAI) to coordinate a project to promote transparency and accountability within Southern Africa on access to medicines.<\/p>\n

The targeted countries include Malawi, Zambia, Botswana and Zimbabwe. As part of enhancing partnerships, AAI is collaborating with the Southern African Regional Program on Access to Medicines and Diagnostics (Sarpam).<\/p>\n

However, Mbewe observes that although medicines might be available, most of the time they are not of good quality citing an example of HIV generic drugs which have been bringing a lot of side effects on patients.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are concerned with the quality of medicines; it is not only about availability, medicines might be there but what about quality? It is important we start to track quality and availability of medicines together,\u201d says Mbewe.<\/p>\n

Most CSOs also lament that Malawi has missed a lot of opportunities to start manufacturing its own generic drugs using some flexibilities within the World Trade Organization (WTO) Trade- Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (Trips).<\/p>\n

The Trips sets out the minimum standards for the protection of intellectual property, including patents for pharmaceuticals.<\/p>\n

Ellen Hoen in her paper called \u2018Trips, Pharmaceutical Patents and Access to Essential Medicines: Seattle, Doha and Beyond notes that while Trips does offer safeguards to remedy negative effects of patent protection or patent abuse, in practice it is unclear whether and how countries can make use of these safeguards when patents increasingly present barriers to medicine access.<\/p>\n

\u201cPublic health advocates welcomed the Doha Declaration as an important achievement because it gave primacy to public health over private intellectual property, and clarified WTO Members\u2019 rights to use Trips safeguards. But the Doha Declaration did not solve all of the problems associated with intellectual property protection and public health,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

The recent failure at the WTO to resolve the outstanding issue to ensure production and export of generic medicines to countries that do not produce may even indicate that the optimism felt at Doha was premature.<\/p>\n

Hoen adds that a number of new medicines that are vital for the survival of millions are already too costly for the vast majority of people in poor countries.<\/p>\n

In addition, investment in Research and Development (R&D) towards the health needs of people in developing countries has almost come to a standstill.<\/p>\n

In addition, developing countries, where three-quarters of the world population lives, account for less than 10 percent of the global pharmaceutical market.<\/p>\n

Sam Jeke, a project officer with Global Hope Mobilisation, a Lilongwe-based NGO with expertise on Trips and access to medicines says that Malawi needs to lobby and ensure to utilise some of the flexibilities within Trips which allow countries to produce generic drugs with few restrictions on the patents.<\/p>\n

He adds that up to now Malawi has failed to make use of Trips and still has to import generics while it could have been cheaper to manufacture high quality drugs here at home and make them readily available.<\/p>\n

In a paper published by the Overseas Development Institute authored by Diana Cammack and Leni Wild, the two note that stock-outs of essential medicines can contribute to a number of challenges for the Malawi health sector.<\/p>\n

Where health facilities experience stock-outs of essential medicines, they may be available only at private providers.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a result, medicines are more expensive (and may be less available). Service users do not receive free essential medicines: they may be forced to use these private or informal providers or have to go without. Moreover, there appears to be significant district-level variation in terms of availability and cost of medicines, which results in inequity of service delivery,\u201d reads in part of the paper<\/p>\n

Cammack and Wild say that in theory, as a trust, the Central Medical Stores Trust (CMST) is envisaged to work in a more business-like fashion, with better cost accounting measures to ensure it is self-financing and with greater independence.<\/p>\n

In practice, aspects of how the trust will be constituted remain undecided, and it does not yet appear to have the full confidence of key stakeholders with respect to whether wholesale reforms will be realised within the specified time period.<\/p>\n

Executive Director of Global Hope Mobilization, Caleb Thole, says that Malawi government needs to be responsive and ensure that essential medicines are available to the people and adds that CSOs are ready to support government.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs CSOs we have already engaged the Ministry of Health especially Department of Pharmaceutical Services. I think government can effectively use Trips, there is a need to enhance collaboration with Sarpam and also speed up the endorsement of the Intellectual Property Rights Policy and tackle the stealing of drugs,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

M\u00e9decins sans Fronti\u00e8res (MSF), together with other NGOs formulated the following concerns related to Trips:<\/p>\n

\u2013 Increased patent protection leads to higher drug prices. The number of new essential drugs under patent protection will increase, but the drugs will remain out of reach to people in developing countries because of high prices. As a result, the access gap between developed and developing countries will widen.<\/p>\n

\u2013 Enforcement of WTO rules will have a negative effect on local manufacturing capacity and will remove a source of generic, innovative, quality drugs on which developing countries depend.<\/p>\n

It is unlikely that Trips will encourage adequate R&D in developing countries for diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis, because poor countries often do not provide sufficient profit potential to motivate R&D investment by the pharmaceutical industry.<\/p>\n

Although Trips brings its own challenges, Malawian CSOs are determined that making full use of Trips and its flexibilities could greatly enhance availability of essential medicines. But only time will tell if intellectual property rights can be translated into action.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a country like Malawi, stock outs of essential medicines and the presence of counterfeit drugs on the market pose a serious risk to people\u2019s lives. Now a collection of civil society organisations are demanding not only accountability and transparency in the access to medicines but also Malawi to latch on provisions for manufacturing of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":32441,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32438"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32442,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32438\/revisions\/32442"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}