WHO bridges rich-poor intellectual property split

By Laura MacInnis

GENEVA (Reuters) - The World Health Organisation's 193 member states overcame their deep divisions over intellectual property rules on Saturday and endorsed a strategy to help improve developing-country access to drugs and medical tests.

At the United Nations agency's annual policy-setting meeting in Geneva, governments also called for WHO Director-General Margaret Chan to finalise a plan of action boosting incentives for drug makers to tackle diseases that afflict the poor.

"The WHO has taken a big step forward to change the way we think about innovation and access to medicines," said James Love of the advocacy group Knowledge Ecology International, who praised the World Health Assembly for its consensus "on topics that were considered controversial only a short time ago."

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning humanitarian group Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) said it was pleased to see health front-and-centre in debates on managing intellectual property, which also spans copyright and trademark laws.

"Some important steps in the right direction have been made," said its Access to Essential Medicines campaign director Tido von Schoen-Angerer, who urged the WHO to support fresh ways to spur medical innovations, such as a prize fund for developing critically-needed tuberculosis diagnostics.

Some issues, including how new incentives would be financed, were not resolved in the intense negotiations capping the week-long World Health Assembly summit, which also analysed international responses to infectious and chronic diseases, climate change, and counterfeit drugs.

The intellectual property resolution requests that Chan, who succeeded Lee Jong-wook as WHO chief in 2006, "finalise urgently the outstanding components of the plan of actions, including time-frames, progress indications and estimated funding needs". That plan will be reviewed at the World Health Assembly in 2009.