LAST WEEK, the governing assembly of the World Health Organization held its annual summit in Geneva. The two big items on the agenda were finalizing and approving a report recently released by the WHO's international public health subcommittee.
The report deals with the role of intellectual property rights in developing countries struggling with disease. Unfortunately, instead of homing in on the real reason so many poor patients don't have access to pharmaceutical drugs -- the lack of health care infrastructure -- the report recommends a systematic undermining of patent protections.
Many of the drugs in poor countries are off patents. But patents aren't the problem. The developing world is awash in cheap and effective drugs. It's just that those drugs aren't getting to the people who need them. And turning the report's recommendations into hard-and-fast policies would make the problem worse by hampering future pharmaceutical development.
The report claims that while "intellectual property rights are an important incentive for the development of new health care products," that "incentive alone does not meet the need for the development of new products to fight diseases."
But the truth speaks otherwise: Half of the on-going drug programs for diseases unique to the developing world are funded by drug companies.
And firms routinely offer patented drugs to poor countries at a steep discount or for free. Last year, Abbott slashed the price of its AIDS anti-viral Kaletra for more than 40 developing countries. Merck did the same for its AIDS drug Efavirenz. And, along with GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer, Merck recently gave away over $450 million worth of drugs to Burkina Faso.
What's really driving up drug prices in the Third World is heavy-handed regulatory intrusions by local governments. All generic medicines entering Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, for instance, are subject to a 10 percent tariff. The rate is 34 percent in Nigeria, 40 percent in Sierra Leone, and a whopping 50 percent in Kenya. Nigeria slams a 5 percent tariff on imported pharmaceutical ingredients (IPIs).
The subcommittee also wants the WHO to "support governments in establishing health-related innovation in developing countries." There is no evidence that poor nations are capable of manufacturing drugs up to international quality and safety standards.
A study released earlier this month by Africa Fighting Malaria, for instance, tested 195 drug packets bought in six major African cities for purity. Half of those actually manufactured in Africa failed, as did a third of those made in Asia.
In 2005 the WHO itself caught Thailand producing ineffective generic AIDS drugs that were spawning treatment-resistant strains of the virus.
The WHO report also supports "the production and introduction of generic versions (of drugs) . . . in developing countries."
True, cheap generic versions of off-patent drugs should be widely available. But encouraging the widespread use of generic versions of patented drugs, as this report does, is dangerous, primarily because it undermines the financial incentives for pharmaceutical firms to develop drugs in the first place.
The average drug now costs over $1 billion to bring to market. Patents drive pharmaceutical innovation by giving manufacturers a chance to recoup that investment. Without patent protections, most producers would go bankrupt or leave the market entirely.
The report also recommends that assembly members "strengthen WHO's ongoing work on pharmaceutical pricing."
That's code for "price controls," which tend to have the same effects as patent-busting. Bureaucrats have a well-established history of undervaluing drugs when setting prices, and that leads to drug shortages.
The real problem with health care in the developing world is the lack of infrastructure. Most countries don't have the facilities or personnel needed to deliver drugs to patients. Recently, the National Association of Nigeria Nurses and Midwives said over 300,000 nurses would be required to make up for the drastic shortage of nurses in the nation's hospitals and clinics.
Worse still, corruption is rampant in Third World governments. The Global Fund has already terminated health care grants to Uganda and Chad because of grant misuse and a lack of transparency.
It's considering doing the same for my home country of Nigeria. No wonder. According to Human Rights Watch, the Nigerian "government's failure to tackle local-level corruption violates Nigeria's obligation to provide basic health and education services to its citizens." Last year, a Nigerian official admitted that donated drugs like vitamin A capsules, Mectizan and Coartem tablets and oral rehydration salt are routinely pilfered and then re-sold on the open market.
As the most powerful public health policy body in the world, the WHO's decisions this month will have widespread implications on how the Third World deals with disease. For the sake of hundreds of millions of poor patients, let's hope it avoids the easy route of just demonizing patents, and tackles the real problems.
Thompson Ayodele is executive director of Initiative for Public Policy Analysis, a public policy think-tank based in Lagos, Nigeria (www.ippanigeria.org).