PATENT MONOPOLY: A PRESENT DAY IMPEDIMENT TO HEALTHY LIFE

Abstract

Rights going by layman’s interpretation are the interests that are protected by a statute. They are fundamental elements of any civilization. For a society to thrive in a chaos free manner various rights must be protected by the state. But in certain circumstances, one can come across conflict between different rights that are justified by law. One such major and extensively debated clash of rights is Right to Health and Patent Monopoly. The former is one of the basic right that every state must protect for proper growth of the society while the latter ensures that an inventor’s interest are sheltered and he should get the reward for putting up his intellectual efforts. Various international and national conventions and seminars have discussed this issue. Two different types of right involving varied stakeholders whose interest is harmed. 

The problem of high prices has been observed by the international community in the context of treatable infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS and malaria. For example in 2000, for a triple-combination antiretroviral (ARV) treatment, the price of the lowest branded treatment was about US$ 10,439 for a year’s supply. Introducing more recent drugs in anti-AIDS combination therapy because of the emergence of resistance to older treatment would increase the annual cost of treating an adult for one year in a developing country from US$ 99 to US$ 426. Since every patient on therapy today is expected to need these newer therapies at some stage of their treatment, the increase in cost will have awful consequences for AIDS programs. 

The high price tag meant patients living with HIV/AIDS would not be able to afford treatment and would be condemned to death. Globally, for instance, costly anti-retroviral drugs do not reach the almost 90% of HIV/AIDS patients living in the poorest 10% of the world's countries. The unaffordable prices of drugs are often the result of strong intellectual property protection.  

The main reason why cheaper generic alternatives were possible for older ARV products is that there were no patents in some developing countries with vibrant generic pharmaceutical industries. India, for example, free from product patents for medicines in pre 2005 era, used to manufacture and supply generic medicines to the rest of the world.