Doctors Without Borders: Asian Trade Deal Could Restrict

Doctors Without Borders: Asian Trade Deal Could Restrict Access to Affordable Generics:

The (RCEP) comprehensive trade agreement regional economic association launches a new series of talks on Sunday in Australia and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) suggests the rights of stricter intellectual property that could restrict access to affordable generic medicines for many Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos.

Economic Regional (RCEP) Association is a free trade agreement (FTA) between the ten member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which includes Brunei, Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia , Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and the six states with which ASEAN has signed free trade agreements in place, including Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand.

A chapter fled the negotiations, published this week by the International NGO KEI shows that Japan and South Korea have made proposals that go beyond what the rules of international trade and therefore require undermine access to medicines affordable generic.

Part of the chapter fugue states: "Each Party shall prevent applicants for marketing authorizations for pharmaceutical products which utilize new chemical entities that rely on or refer to the tests or other data submitted to the competent authority by the first applicant for a certain period of time from the date of approval of this application. from the date of entry into force of this Agreement, it is expected that this period will not be less than five years by the applicable laws of each Party ".

Two thirds of all acquisitions SPS drugs to treat HIV, tuberculosis and malaria are Generics India and reduce access to medicines, especially under the pretext of data exclusivity could block the entry of generic drugs to other regional markets, even for drugs that are already protected by a patent, the group said.

 "If the agreement measures prevent people to get generic drugs they need, the health consequences of any delay or interruption of treatment for many diseases, such as HIV, could be severe," said Dr. Greg Elder, MSF medical coordinator of Campaign access. "97% of HIV drugs MSF uses to treat 230,000 people living with the disease are generics from India. The reality is, not generic, would not be able to treat as many people as us. We urge the negotiators India and the Association to ensure that the terms of any trade agreement does not preclude the supply of generic medicines to us and many people in developing countries depend. "

MSF and KEI does not agree with the exclusivity provisions of the biological data of the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiated last year.

James Love, director of KEI said. "The RCEP will be a massive trade agreement and the content of the IP chapter is important to join India and China, two countries excluded from the TPP ... Some of the issues that negotiators not included in the TPP, like the damages provisions are also lurking in the text, creating a risk that negotiators will be worse than you think, because the secret negotiations isolated negotiators timely feedback on complex technical issues. Japan and Korea are pushing to put monopolies test data without the same guarantees to patent monopolies ".