The new EU proposal seeks to embrace and legitimize the Trojan proposal to highlight a handful of tropical diseases as the intended scope for the Doha Declaration. If the EU was sincere in its efforts to place this in a public health framework, it would have dropped the Trojan list, which is an unacceptable limitation on the diseases that the poor suffer from, and shift the entire paragraph 6 debate to the World Health Organization, and let the WHO deal with safeguards, legal mechanisms, the scope of technologies and diseases, and other areas where the WTO is clearly out of its depth. Indeed, developing countries should ask the WHO at the January 20 executive board meeting, to take up this debate, and get it right.

Jamie
202-361-3040

http://europa.eu.int/comm/trade/csc/pr090103_en.htm