According to the World Health Organization, one-third of the global population lacks access to essential medicines. Should pharmaceutical companies be ethically or legally responsible for providing affordable medicines for these people, even though they live outside of profitable markets? Can the private sector be held accountable for protecting human beings' right to health? This thought-provoking interdisciplinary collection grapples with corporate responsibility for the provision of medicines in low- and middle-income countries. The book begins with an examination of human rights, norms, and ethics in relation to the private sector, moving to consider the tensions between pharmaceutical companies' social and business duties. Broad examinations of global conditions are complemented by case studies illustrating different approaches for addressing corporate conduct. Access to Medicines as a Human Right identifies innovative solutions applicable in both global and domestic forums, making it a valuable resource for the vast field of scholars, legal practitioners, and policymakers who must confront this challenging issue.

Patent rights on pharmaceutical products are one of the factors responsible for the lack of access to affordable medicines in developing countries. In this work, Emmanuel Kolawole Oke provides a systematic analysis of the tension between patent rights and human rights law, contending that, in order to preserve their patent policy space and secure access to affordable medicines for their citizens, developing countries should incorporate a model of human rights into the design, implementation, interpretation, and enforcement of their national patent laws. Through a comprehensive analysis of court decisions from three key developing countries (India, Kenya, and South Africa), Oke assesses the effectiveness of national courts in resolving conflicts between patent rights and the right to health, and demonstrates how a model of human rights can be incorporated into the adjudication of patent rights.

Transnational Legal Orders offers an empirically grounded approach to the emergence of legal orders beyond nation-states that reframes the study of law and society.

This book examines one of the most controversial aspects of the world trading system: patents and access to medication, and offers approaches to tackle the issue of how to better accommodate human rights in the trading system.

Equitable Access to High-Cost Pharmaceuticals seeks to aid the development and implementation of equitable public health policies by pharmaco-economics professionals, health economists, and policymakers. With detailed country-by country analysis of policy and regulation, the Work compares and contrasts national healthcare systems to support researchers and practitioners identify optimal healthcare policy solutions. The Work incorporates chapters on global regulatory changes, health technology assessment guidelines, and competitive effectiveness research recommendations from international bodies such as the OECD or the EU. Novel policies such as horizon scanning, managed-entry agreement and post-launch monitoring are considered in detail. The Work also thoroughly reviews novel pharmaceuticals with particular research interest, including cancer drugs, orphan medicines, Hep C, and personalized medicines. - Evaluates impact and efficacy of current access policies and pricing regulation of high-cost drugs - Incorporates existing guidelines and recommendations by international organizations - Compares and contrasts how different countries fund and police high-cost drug access - Explores novel and emergent policies, including managed entry agreement, analysis of real world data and differential pricing - Reviews novel pharmaceuticals of current research interest

In Prescription for the People, Fran Quigley diagnoses our inability to get medicines to the people who need them and then prescribes the cure. He delivers a clear and convincing argument for a complete shift in the global and U.S. approach to developing and providing essential medicines—and a primer on how to make that change happen. Globally, 10 million people die each year because they are unable to pay for medicines that would save them. The cost of prescription drugs is bankrupting families and putting a strain on state and federal budgets. Patients’ desperate need for affordable medicines clashes with the core business model of the powerful pharmaceutical industry, which maximizes profits whenever possible. It doesn’t have to be this way. Patients and activists are aiming to make all essential medicines affordable by reclaiming medicines as a public good and a human right, instead of a profit-making commodity. In this book, Quigley demystifies statistics and terminology, offers solutions to the problems that block universal access to medicines, and provides a road map for activists wanting to make those solutions a reality.

The issue of how patents impact medicine has increased in significance within the last decade. The book provides an explanation of the current international infrastructure and explains how competing patent perspectives play a thus far unacknowledged role in promoting distortion and confusion.

Millions of people around the world do not have access to the medicines they need to treat disease or alleviate suffering. Strict patent regimes introduced following the establishment of the World Trade Organization in 1995 interfere with widespread access to medicines by creating monopolies that keep medicines prices well out of reach for many. 0The AIDS crisis in the late nineties brought access to medicines challenges to the public?s attention, when millions of people in developing countries died from an illness for which medicines existed, but were not available or affordable. Faced with an unprecedented health crisis ? 8,000 people dying daily ? the public health community launched an unprecedented global effort that eventually resulted in the large-scale availability of low-priced generic HIV medicines. 0But now, high prices of new medicines - for example, for cancer, tuberculosis and hepatitis C - are limiting access to treatment in low-, middle and high-income countries alike. Patent-based monopolies affect almost all medicines developed since 1995 in most countries, and global health policy is now at a critical juncture if the world is to avoid new access to medicines crises. 0This book discusses lessons learned from the HIV/AIDS crisis, and asks whether actions taken to extend access and save lives are exclusive to HIV or can be applied more broadly to new global access challenges.

“A broad-ranging, insightful analysis of the complex practical and ethical issues involved in global health.”—Kirkus Reviews Few topics in human rights have inspired as much debate as the right to health. Proponents would enshrine it as a fundamental right on a par with freedom of speech and freedom from torture. Detractors suggest that the movement constitutes an impractical over-reach. Jonathan Wolff cuts through the ideological stalemate to explore both views. In an accessible, persuasive voice, he explores the philosophical underpinnings of the idea of a human right, assesses whether health meets those criteria, and identifies the political and cultural realities we face in attempts to improve the health of citizens in wildly different regions. Wolff ultimately finds that there is a path forward for proponents of the right to health, but to succeed they must embrace certain intellectual and practical changes. The Human Right to Health is a powerful and important contribution to the discourse on global health.

This Open Access volume provides in-depth analysis of the wide range of ethical issues associated with drug-resistant infectious diseases. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is widely recognized to be one of the greatest threats to global public health in coming decades; and it has thus become a major topic of discussion among leading bioethicists and scholars from related disciplines including economics, epidemiology, law, and political theory. Topics covered in this volume include responsible use of antimicrobials; control of multi-resistant hospital-acquired infections; privacy and data collection; antibiotic use in childhood and at the end of life; agricultural and veterinary sources of resistance; resistant HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria; mandatory treatment; and trade-offs between current and future generations. As the first book focused on ethical issues associated with drug resistance, it makes a timely contribution to debates regarding practice and policy that are of crucial importance to global public health in the 21st century.