It is absolutely amazing that many people who consider themselves as cultured keep searching for a single and unique guilty for the lack of drugs access for a particular portion of the Brazilian and the world population, and, conveniently, put the blame on pharmaceutical industry.
Repeated allegations by those people show the lack of transparency about the real reasons for the threats and for the proposition of numerous Bills precluding AIDS drugs to be patentable. But they do not inform to the public or to the media, for example, that the AIDS Program budget for 2004 (about R$ 540 millions) is almost 15% less than the budget for the program in 1999 (approximately R$ 620 millions) and that, as a result, this program's budget, which corresponded to 3.2% of the Ministry budget, currently accounts for 1.8%.
Furthermore, this reduced budget was enough to treat, in 2004, twice the number of patients (155 thousand) treated in 1999 (76 thousand). Although those numbers are (suddenly) changed without a clear reason, I have copies of documents downloaded from official websites and of presentations delivered by government members, including from March 2005, presenting the numbers as mentioned above.
The idea that an increasing number of patients could be treated each year while decreasing the amount budgeted indicates a lack of responsibility, because the government is responsible for budging its expenses and does it badly. According to data informed by the newspaper 'Folha de São Paulo', this government spent, in 2004, the amount of R$ 525 million in advertisement (to speak in its own favor) and will spend R$ 620 million until the end of 2005. The book "The Cost of Rights", by Stephen Holmes, Professor of Politics at Princeton University and by Cass R. Sunstein, Professor of Law Philosophy at the University of Chicago, clearly explains that rights cost money and governments should be prepared to pay for the rights it grants.
This does not seem to be the case in Brazil, where the Constitution is prodigal in distributing rights and quite modest in indicating which income sources will pay for granting these rights.
Activists, with the real sense of responsibility inherent to them, cannot accept that governmental expenses in advertisement in 2004 are nearly in the same amount spent for buying drugs against AIDS.
Accordingly, it is necessary to definitely settle those doubts created as a result of information based in myths about patents, for the sake of transparency:
1- Patent laws are not a novelty. The oldest ones remit to the year of 1474. International laws, including the Paris Convention of 1883, do not impose any restraint to drugs patenting, provided the same pre-requirements for patenting any other product are met.
2- Industrial property laws do encourage new discoveries. Just see the number of new drugs for all kinds of diseases that have been discovered in the past few years in countries such as Japan, Italy, Switzerland, and others that started to comply with industrial property rights in the last 35 to 40 years. Similarly, the approval of this kind of law in Brazil enabled local laboratories, even those public ones, to present a number of drugs patent requests.
3- The exclusivity period of a pharmaceutical product in the market is, in average, 10 years, not 20, as emphasized by people who know exactly the truth. This happens because the term of 20 years for a patent starts to be counted from the date the request is filed and, the time from product creation process, clinical researches and approval by a regulatory agency (ANVISA, in the case of Brazil) takes approximately 10 years.
4- There is no monopoly in diseases treatment. The object of a patent is the drug (the molecule) that will compete (as indeed does) with other patented drugs and, for some of which, patent has already expired. How many patented and non-patented drugs are there in the market for the treatment of AIDS, arterial hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, or infections? Only for the treatment of arterial hypertension, there are dozens with no patent protection.
5- The discovery of new drugs and the continuity of researches account for reductions on mortality rates and on expenses with the treatment of patients with HIV/ AIDS. No one can deny this. Indeed, statistical data by the Ministry of Health allow us to easily come to this conclusion.
If the situation is different in Africa and in some other places in the world, that's because there is no infrastructure allowing the drug to reach the places where it is needed and there aren't physicians and practices enough to follow patients up. Thus, it is not the lack of drugs, but the lack of structure that precludes treatment.
Finally, Brazil has not recognized drugs patents during the period of 1945 to 1996 - fifty-one years - and has not recognized the patents for drugs manufacturing processes from 1969 to 1996 - twenty-eight years. During all that time, neither national industry, nor the government, has been dedicated, as they should to the creation of a national industry of research and development.
Today, Brazil has a much smaller and less active basic industry in the pharmaceutical field than India and China, just to mention two examples of countries that currently comply with drugs patents. Now, with industrial property rights protection, perhaps there is incentive for Brazilian companies to enter in research and development of new drugs that will be necessary in the future for treating pathologies that still do not count on a definitive therapy.
