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Patents on Drugs: Manufacturing Scarcity or Advancing Health?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Bebe Loff  and
Mark Heywood
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Respect for and promotion of the human rights of people with HIV/AIDS is now an entrenched component of the global response to HIV. However, as the global HIV epidemic has turned into a global AIDS epidemic, and as the death toll mounts, one area of human rights—the right to health care—has become fiercely contested. In particular, the degree to which patents on medicines impede what the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has described as the “human right” of access to essential medicines is receiving close scrutiny. The controversy generated by a recent article that argues, “in Africa patents and patent law are not a major barrier to treatment access in and of themselves,” is indicative of the intensity of the debate.

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Article
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Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , Winter 2002 , pp. 621 - 631
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Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2002

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References

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