Jamie Love

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March 15, 2013 | 12:30 PM | By  | 

Op-Ed: How a new trade agreement will hurt poor’s access to medicines | 

Guest Column by James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International

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President Barack Obama, in his 2013 State of the Union address, referred to an international trade proposal called the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement, or TPP for short. It’s a massive set of trade negotiations with a lot at stake, affecting about 40% of all global commerce from the use of the internet to the price of drugs.

drug money
Flickr, Brooks Elliott

Salon called the Trans-Pacific Partnership the biggest trade deal you’ve never heard of, and speculated it “could potentially be the most significant foreign and domestic policy initiative of the Obama Administration.”

So why haven’t you heard of it? Three reasons:

  • First, the negotiations of the TPP are held in secret, making it hard to report.
  • Second, trade agreements are perceived to deal with technical and obscure issues that news editors think would bore most readers to death.
  • Finally, the White House makes it sound as if the trade agreement simply imposes “our” norms on foreigners, making it seem less relevant to U.S. readers

The TPP, in fact, will be a game-changer for all of us and is woefully lacking in media coverage.

Enough is known by activists about the negotiations to paint a fairly clear picture of its impact on global prices for medicines. That’s what I’m focusing on here. In particular, the TPP is poised to reverse major concessions on intellectual property rights protection for medicines in developing countries that were put in place in 2007 by the Bush Administration.

I think it’s both surprising and worth reporting that the Obama Administration is actually more hostile to the interests of the global poor than was the Bush Administration. 

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Business, Health, drug industry, drug prices, Jamie Love, Knowledge Ecology International, Trans-Pacific Partnership
September 23, 2011 | 2:57 PM | By  | 

Final wrap on UN Week and the ‘historic’ global health confab | 

Tom Paulson

Someone important going to the UN

A news analysis:

As I head home from the Big Apple, the big news here today is that Palestine formally requested membership at the United Nations as a step toward becoming an independent nation. The actual vote comes later but the UN isn’t really a democracy. The U.S. has vowed to kill it with a veto in the UN Security Council.

Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s antics at the UN are already old news. Other top stories today include a satellite coming down and some Swiss nerds claiming they sent subatomic particles faster than Einstein said they can go.

An earlier meeting by the UN General Assembly was repeatedly hailed by those who care about poverty, health and social justice as “historic.” But it seemed to come and go with little notice.

I reported earlier this week on this much lower-profile UN High-Level Meeting on Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs), admitting the entire time that I wasn’t quite sure what happened at this global health confab, or if it will matter much.

I couldn’t tell in part because of the byzantine manner which the UN does things, beginning with the apparently common UN practice of deciding on the outcome of a meeting before you have the meeting. I also couldn’t tell because the media is highly constrained and can only talk to participants at about the same level of engagement as someone jailed in solitary confinement.

That said, the UN meeting on NCDs does have the potential for something great … to emerge from this fog of sound-bites, press briefings and celebrity appearances. This could actually turn out to be historic, an expansion and re-ordering of the global health agenda.

It isn’t yet, however. As several of us who follow global health closely (obsessively, sometimes angrily) have noted, the UN didn’t really accomplish much of substance this week. As Laurie Garrett, perhaps the top global health journalist (or former journalist?) now with the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on her blog:

After months of haggling, millions of dollars’ worth of meetings and travel costs and a prodigious mountain of studies and documents prepared in anticipation, the final Declaration of the UN High Level Meeting  is little more than a wishy-washy rendition of problems and vague solutions that are obvious to even casual observers….

Laurie, who is a friend, goes on to cite my earlier reports saying much the same thing and then calls me “super-insightful.” Wow, and I only paid her $20. Others just call me cranky. But I think we all want this thing to move forward, to expand the reach of the fight against the diseases of poverty. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, Ann Keeling, Jamie Love, Lautrie Garrett, NCD Alliance, non-communicable diseases, UN Week, United Nations
September 20, 2011 | 7:03 AM | By  | 

UN health summit makes food, beverage and drug industries nervous | 

Flickr, Roadsidepictures

Members of the United Nations General Assembly met this week to come up with a plan to combat chronic disease in poor countries that appears to have some in the food, beverage and drug industries worried.

Ten years ago, a similar meeting here produced a massive global response to the AIDS pandemic, most notably with the creation of the Global Fund for Fighting AIDS, TB and Malaria (which yesterday, despite clearly saving many millions of lives, got slammed for not working as well as advertised).

The expectation at the UN meeting is that delegates will decide that somebody should do something … and would like to be more specific, but then say they are late for another meeting, grab their hats and coats and make for the door.

Part of the problem is that many chronic diseases are “lifestyle” diseases — lifestyles that a lot of corporations want us to buy into.

The need for action is clear: Chronic or non-communicable diseases (aka NCDs) are the world’s big killers, representing about 60 percent of all causes of death. Cancer, heart disease, stroke, lung disease (mostly from tobacco), diabetes and the like kill many more people — most of them in the developing world — than do infectious diseases like AIDS, TB or malaria.

But governments, donors, the drug industry and health agencies don’t set their global health priorities simply on the basis of the burden of disease, as reasonable as that might sound. Some diseases are too complex, their treatment too expensive, to feasibly act against in poor countries.

Many of the NCDs are, however, easily and cheaply treated or prevented. High blood pressure can be treated with drugs costing pennies per day. Tackling some of the biggest killers, the World Health Organization says, can be done at a cost of about $1.20 per day.

Simply educating people about a healthy diet and the risks of tobacco or excessive alcohol use could do a lot.

It all sounds do-able, this aim to shift the global health agenda to include these non-contagious killers. So why the pessimism about getting a meaningful game plan out of this UN meeting?

Part of the problem is the concerns of industry. These health goals sometimes run up against powerful commercial interests in the food, beverage and pharmaceutical industries.

UN

UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon

“There is a well-documented and shameful history of certain players in industry who ignored the science, sometimes even their own research, and put public health at risk to protect their own profits,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Monday in a speech on the NCDs.

Ban cited the tobacco and alcohol industries, but also makers of processed foods high in salt, sugar and fat — and the media companies that advertise unhealthy products. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, Politics, Ban Ki-Moon, industry, intellectual property, Jamie Love, non-communicable diseases, UN Week