Access to Medicines Law Left Unchanged

Oxfam Canada today accused Parliament of leaving millions of ill people without affordable medicine by shutting down without fixing Canada's faulty Access to Medicines Regime. The 2004 law allows Canadian companies to export generic versions of patented medicines to developing countries, but has proved unworkable. In two years under the current regime, not a single pill has gone anywhere.

'People are suffering and dying for want of medicines Canada can produce and export, said Robert Fox, executive director of Oxfam Canada. 'Simple amendments would streamline the law, but the government and the opposition ended up doing nothing.

The government promised a review of the law at the time of the International AIDS Conference in August 2006, but has yet to present its findings, even though the law required the review be submitted to Parliament by May of this year.

Oxfam Canada has repeatedly urged Parliamentarians to fix a system that is overly complex and restrictive. 'The current regime is bound tightly in needless red tape, included at the insistence of the big pharmaceutical companies, Fox said. 'One key problem is that the entire process of licensing has to be pursued for every contract for each medicine. Once a Canadian company has developed a generic version of a medicine, why not market it in other poor countries or in additional quantities, without additional red tape?

Women bear the brunt of coping with the high burden of disease in poor countries, Oxfam noted, and are disproportionately affected by the failure to provide affordable medicines. Women are the primary caregivers, and are often more likely to be ill. In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, women make up 59% of the adults infected with HIV/AIDS.