R&D Resolution Formally Submitted To WHO Board Meeting

Brazil and Kenya have officially submitted a resolution on a new global framework for research and development (R&D) to the 23-28 January World Health Organisation Executive Board meeting and the resolution has been placed under an agenda item to come up later this week.

The resolution (EB117/Conf.Paper No.3) was formally submitted on Monday afternoon, a spokesperson from the WHO secretariat said, and on Tuesday it was distributed at the WHO board meeting together with five translations (French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian and Chinese), according to a participant.

The resolution will not be posted on the WHO website at this point, according to a WHO spokesperson.

The resolution has been placed under the board meeting agenda item 4.10, which is “intellectual property rights, innovation and public health,” expected to be discussed by the board later this week.

Kenya first submitted this resolution alone to the WHO in November last year but the procedural requirements have only been fulfilled now. Brazil later joined in as a co-sponsor (IPW, UN, 17 January 2006).

James Love, director of Consumer Project on Technology, said in his organisation’s email list serve that changes made by the secretariat include the removal of the terms ‘public goods’ and ‘trade’ “as editorial changes, but the basic content seems pretty much the same.” He was concerned, however, that it is not clear that the resolution applies to noncommunicable diseases.

In the resolution, Kenya and Brazil request the director general to “Establish a working group of interested member states to consider proposals to establish a global framework for supporting needs-driven research, consistent with appropriate public interest issues and taking note of the work of the WHO Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation and Public Health (CIPIH).”

The proposal also calls for the WHO “To ensure that bilateral, regional and global free-trade agreements and other trade agreements do not jeopardize the flexibilities of the TRIPS Agreement [World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights] and are in the accordance with the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health.”

It further calls for the submission of “a progress report of the working group of interested member states to the Sixtieth World Health Assembly (May 2008) and a final report with concrete proposals to the executive board at its 121st session (January 2009).”

Finally, it requests the director general to “ensure the report of the CIPIH is included in the agendas of the WHO’s regional committees in 2006.” The second and fourth items on bilaterals and the CIPIH are new compared with a previous draft of the resolution.

The resolution also urges member states to “make global health and medicines a strategic sector and take determined action to direct priorities in R&D according to the needs of the patients, especially those in resource-poor settings.”

Love also warned against likely “procedural attacks” to be made by Canada and the European Union with lobbying by the United States, Switzerland and others.