Knowledge Ecology International

This morning the 62nd session World Health Assembly agreed to a resolution on public health, innovation and intellectual property that, among other things, settled outstanding issues regarding the “stakeholders” for various parts of the Global Strategy and Plan of Action. (GS/PoA). With regard to the issue of a possible medical R&D treaty, the outcome of the negotiation was something of a split decision. On the one hand, the WHA agreed that the WHO would not be a stakeholder, in terms of the specific element of the WHO Global Strategy document. Continue Reading →

This is the statement that the government of Bolivia delivered today to the 62nd World Health Assembly at the conclusion of the discussions on the Global Strategy and Plan of Action on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property (WHA 61.21).

Statement of Bolivia on resolving outstanding elements of agenda item 12.8

Joint Statement on behalf of

Bangladesh, Barbados, Bolivia and Suriname, and
Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela

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The WHA will take up the WHA IGWG resolution at 9AM on Friday.

When discussing the issue of excluding the WHO from discussions about a medical R&D treaty, one PhRMA lobbyist told me “this was put to bed long ago.” He was in part referring to a WHO “green room” meeting that was organized before the Obama inauguration. One negotiator said the pharmaceutical companies are pressing hard to kill the medical R&D treaty here “before the new people take over.”

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21 May 2009

Today at the World Health Assembly (WHA) the US and EU are opposing that the WHO have a mandate on global research and development norms, including the possibility for Member States to negotiate at WHO a global biomedical R&D treaty.

Developing countries governments made very strong interventions this morning on this issue (among them India, Bolivia, Barbados, Suriname, Bangladesh, Ghana, Argentina, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Cuba and Jamaica) and are wondering where are the promises of multilateralism made by the new Obama administration.

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Thursday, 21 May 2009

Delegates at the World Health Assembly will have to grapple with how best to deploy their delegations to simultaneously cover pandemic influenza and resolving the outstanding elements of the WHO IGWG Plan of Action.

Today’s WHO Journal lists the following morning schedule for Committee A.

Item 11 (continued) Medium-strategic plan, including Proposed Programme budget 2010-2011

To consider appropriation resolution for financial period 2010-2011

Item 12 (continued) Technical and health matters

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This morning a draft Resolution proposed by the Delegations of Canada, Chile, Iran (Islamic Republic), Japan, Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Norway and Switzerland was distributed to the 62nd WHA as document A62/A/Conf.Paper No.4

If approved in its current form, the resolution will conclude the Plan of Action with the stakeholders, time frames and progress indicators proposed by the documents distributed by the WHO PHI secretariat this week.

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May 18, 2009

Open Letter to WHO Member States on outstanding components of Plan of Action on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property

Dear WHO Member States,

During the 2008 World Heath Assembly WHO Member States reached unanimous consensus on resolution WHA 61.21 that adopted a Global Strategy and unfinished Plan of Action on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual property.

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On Monday, 18 May 2009, WHO released document A62/16 Add.3 entitled “Open paragraphs on stakeholders“.

The link for this document is: http://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/A62/A62_16Add3-en.pdf

The cover sheet of this document states:

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I spent a few minutes today on Amazon, to check on reports that some Kindle titles now have text to speech disabled. Among the authors who are “turning off” text to speech in Kindle editions of books are President Obama, Vice President Biden, Toni Morrison, the Pope, Stephen King, Maya Angelou, Mother Teresa, Isaac Asimov, Tom Brokaw, P.D. James, Robert B. Reich, George Will and Ann Coulter, to mention a few.

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KEI has a page that summarizes the minimum terms of protection for copyright and related rights in multilateral treaties. The most binding constraints are those included in the WTO TRIPS Agreement. Those constraints are as follows:

Most literary and artistic works protected by copyright under the Berne would have a minimum copyright term calculated on the basis of the life of the author plus 50 years.

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