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Egyptian authorities should immediately release at least 29 young activists who were arrested yesterday in Nag’ Hammadai while on their way to pay their condolences to the families of six Coptic Christians shot and killed on the Coptic Christmas Eve, Human Rights Watch said today. read...

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I recently received an interesting email from Jerry Norris at the Center for Science in Public Policy. Like us at the CFD, he was somewhat taken aback by the recent Oxfam paper attacking private healthcare provision:The Oxfam study, "Blind Optimism", challenges so-called myths about private health care in poor countries. It is a contemporary re-statement of the decades-old argument for universal health care.  This ignores the fact that as post-colonial nations emerged from Africa and the Sub-continent of Asia in the early 1960s, everyone of them had embedded in their new Constitutions the provision for free, universal health care.   The problem in bringing this provision into reality was that while everything was free, the governments had little or nothing to offer. Into this...

Oxfam, a state-funded pro-aid lobby group, released a major report yesterday slamming the World Bank for supporting private sector healthcare in less developed countries. (Blind Optimism: challenging the myths about private health provision in poor countries)Its objections, according to Andrew Jack's report in the FT, are that private care boosts inequality of access, costs more and contributed to a brain drawn of trained health workers. The study might have more credibility if it wasn't so wilfully selective of evidence.To determine the level of private coverage, it cited World Bank Demographic Surveys, but then selects only 15 of the 21 countries they cover.  Oxfam only counts visits to private doctors, ignoring visits to private clinics and hospitals. It also ignores the private...

The bien-pensant MSF have a new book out confusingly entitled "The global politics of pharmaceutical monopoly".The author, Ellen T'Hoen, is presumably referring in her title to the temporary product "monopolies" granted by pharmaceutical patents. She clearly thinks they are A Bad Thing.But hang on a minute.  MSF and their buddies at Oxfam are amongst the most vocal supporters of monopolies in government-provided healthcare.  Why are state health monopolies (which are permanent, and encompass all kinds of different services) any better than pharmaceutical patents (which last 20 years from filing and only cover a single product)?Patents are responsible for most modern medicines.  State healthcare monpolies, by contrast, are responsible for thousands of deaths by hospital infection,...

Today is the 20th annual World AIDS Day.  The challenge for AIDS activists and campaigners is to pique the interest of editors and journalists to ensure coverage of what has become a predictable event: the UN or some other body claiming we are on the brink of a global catastrophe, and that only billions more dollars of donor funding can prevent the biggest humanitarian crisis of all time from getting worse. Except this year, many people from within the global health community are beginning to rebel against this formula, detailed in this provocative piece from the Associated Press.  As people such as Roger England point out, AIDS is undoubtedly a a great tragedy, but so too are the myriad easily preventable diseases that kill even more people - such as diarhoea or pneumonia. Why don't...

It has recently been announced that Canada will finally begin exporting generic drugs under a compulsory license to Rwanda. The drug in question is an ARV called Apo-TriAvir, made by Apotex of Canada.Five years after the compulsory license was first signed, the first pill might now start rolling off the production line.   The minister of health in Rwanda, in justifying the award to Canada, said "[we] could have imported generics from elsewhere [but] we wanted to bring Apotex in as a quality generic manufacturer."   Neither Apotex nor Rwanda mention that this has been made possible by the Government of Canada's $100 million subsidy. What all this goes to show is that the production of high quality generic medicines that meet acceptable regulatory standards is a...

The BBC covers today a new report from British pressure group, Save the Children, which claims that economic growth does not necessarily translate into a healthier population. The report cites examples such as India, which still suffers high rates of child mortality despite having undergone a prolonged period of economic growth. This report is saying nothing new. Reading between the lines, it is a fairly standard call for governments to redistribute wealth and intervene more heavily in the economy, in order to iron out the inequalities which they perceive to perpetuate ill health. However, economic growth certainly does improve health of the individuals who are able to benefit from it, not least because it enables people to afford better sanitation and living conditions, which are key...

After years of campaigning, activists have narrowed the debate about health care in poor countries to a single premise: Patents drive up the cost of medicines, so patents are bad. As part of this campaign, activist groups such as Medecins sans Frontieres and Knowledge Ecology International regularly cite the fact that few drugs have been developed for several tropical diseases. On the basis of this, they claim that markets are incapable of providing drugs that people need. It takes quite a distortion of the evidence to support this claim.  Nevertheless, the NGOs argue that the current market-based system through which drugs are developed needs to be dismantled, and replaced with a system where government experts decide what needs to be researched.  They would then allocate...

In the ongoing battle to improve access to medicines in the poorest parts of the world, the global health community is resurrecting a ghost from the 1950s: the promotion and protection of local pharmaceutical companies, who can then supply home markets without the need for unreliable foreign suppliers. This latest version of the hoary 'infant industry' protectionist trade policy comes with the backing of a medley of NGOs, UN agencies and even the World Bank. It seems that the results of this protectionism are as suspect as the theory.  In this new paper from the CFD, author Roger Bate takes a look at the economics of subsidising local drug production, and finds that it gives rise to a whole host of unintended consequences.  Most dangerously for patients, it seems that many...

I'm shortly off to Hong Kong to get ready for next weeks Ministerial Trade meeting. International Policy Network will be keeping you up to date with events at our trade blog, www.freedomtotrade.org/blog. Hopefully the forces of protectionism and vested-interest will not prevail in Hong Kong, although things are looking shakey at the moment.  But keep an eye on the Freedom to Trade Blog to understand what's really going......