Original news and analysis on international IP policy
The World Trade Organization intellectual property committee will meet next week with some new issues on the agenda. Ecuador has requested the continuance of a discussion on the transfer of green technologies, and Taiwan and the United States have proposed an agenda item on innovation incubators.
In the post-2015 Development Agenda, United Nations members must explicitly support research and development, related policies and capacity building with special attention to the low and middle income countries, in order to advance global health targets, experts said at a recent event in Geneva.
Reflecting its growing place on the international policy agenda, nutrition was a major focus of last week’s World Health Assembly.
Gavin Cloherty is associate director of scientific affairs at the US molecular diagnosis developer Abbott Molecular. Abbott has a long-standing history of developing tests for detecting and monitoring hepatitis, among other areas. With Intellectual Property Watch, Cloherty discussed the burden of hepatitis C, the process of diagnosis and the importance of diagnosis for curbing and treating the disease.
The prevention and control of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) stands high on the agenda of World Health Organization member countries, many of them said last week. Governments called for a multi-stakeholder approach to tackle the problem, governed by firm rules, and some asked for ways to regulate products that increase risk factors.
Faced with growing global concern over microbial resistance to antibiotic treatments, the World Health Assembly last week adopted a resolution to establish a global action plan on antimicrobial resistance.
Immunization coverage in many developing countries remains low and even shows a decrease in some cases, according to the report of a World Health Organization advisory group of experts, to be noted by this week’s World Health Assembly. A number of developing countries yesterday underlined the high cost of new vaccines and asked that the WHO help them campaign for lower prices.
Multiple stakeholders are pushing for a World Health Organization-led global action plan to curb antimicrobial resistance.
World Health Organization Director General Margaret Chan opened the annual World Health Assembly today with strong calls to address a wide range of top health concerns across the world. This included a call for the global health community to work to assert the primacy of health concerns over economic interests.
“Governments have few sources of leverage over increasingly globalised food systems - but public procurement is one of them,” the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to adequate food states in a new report. The right to food should be included in public food purchasing according to five principles in order to make food systems fairer and more sustainable, he said.
A working group established by the international seed treaty of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) this week is examining ways to raise its income level, in particular innovative approaches to attract more industry participation.
The Geneva IP delegates list is updated! As a special feature for our subscribers, Intellectual Property Watch has assembled a new list of many of the leading government delegates working on intellectual property issues in Geneva.