Medsin Campaigns @ GHC 09: Climate Change and Patent Pools!
Written by Jonny Currie, over 2 years ago | Permalink
Campaign Stunts at the Global Health Conference
‘Protect Our Planet: Protect Our Health’ Medsin’s Healthy Planet campaign has been working hard to gather support from the health community for the Climate and Health Council – who are ambitiously seeking to represent the voice of health professionals at the renegotiation of a global treaty on climate change this December. As the former Kyoto Protocol expires, a new agreement is required to hold governments accountable in acting on climate change.
The consequences for health if anthropogenic climate change is allowed to transpire may be severe: further droughts, natural disasters, famines, floods. Expanding infectious disease spread, ‘climate refugees’ to the order of 50-200 million brought into being from volatility and conflicts created or exacerbated by these processes.
Delegates were invited to take part in a visual representation of the voice of the health community as 2 giant lungs, calling our government to listen to those in the health community in taking to heart the health consequences of climate change, and committing to a effectual treaty. With green fingers and a lot of paint the photo does justice to people’s passion for the issue!
Anybody interested in engaging in these issues should visit http://www.medsin.org/campaigns/healthyplanet to find out more.
Push for the Pool!
Following the impassioned plea from delegates on climate change issues, the focus moved on the Sunday to what students are calling for around the country and abroad from pharmaceutical companies and politicians: an equitable model for drug financing to accomplish access to medicines for all.
StopAIDS and Universities Allied for Essential Medicines have both been calling recently for support for a ‘Patent Pool’ for HIV drugs with the drug financing body UNITAID. Drug patents reward researchers for their achievements in creating drugs for patients, but in developing countries often precipitate unaffordably high drug prices through effectively a monopoly of the pharmaceutical market for one company’s drug. A patent pool would seek to financially reward researchers and companies, while allowing the patents involved in a drug or medicine regime to be forgone to reduce the price of drugs, and therefore treat more patients at an affordable rate.
People were in high spirits as they gathered behind several representing pharmaceutical companies, government ministers and university researchers and literally pushed, shoved and ‘Pushed for the pool’ in encouraging all drug research stakeholders to commit to UNITAID’s patent pool for HIV medication. This model if initiated could be expanded to other expensive drug treatments, if the support is made now and urgently.
A round-up of the issue is available at http://www.msfaccess.org/main/access-patents/take-the-patent-pool-plunge/ and of course visit the StopAIDS and UAEM websites at www.medsin.org/campaigns to find out how you can get involved!
Final Remarks The issues presented to us were complex, they were at times muddling and to some may leave us disenchanted with the world in which we live. To others, they were a call to action. As countless media, conversations and pointers in the economic downturn suggest, our economic order is failing us. Importantly also, we are failing others. The people that will be most affected by crises such as recessions, climate change, and international aid fluctuations will be those in the poorest parts of the world.
Student activism and project engagement grant us the opportunity to reshape our unsustainable and at times unjust world. This weekend we continued as an organisation to reshape what we want from the world, and here’s to when we’re all grown ups and the positions those lecturing at the conference alluded to!
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