INTRODUCTION

The problem dealt with in this dissertation concerns the issue of access to essential medicines by patients in the developing world. The core of the problem is that a great number of patients in developing countries do not have adequate access to essential medicines for a variety of reasons, resulting in a devastating effect on public health world-wide. The research question addressed here is the following: Does patent protection interfere with patients’ access to essential medicines? And, how do we define “interfere”, “access” and “essential medicines”?

The WHO considers adequate access to medicines a priority health issue and stated that improvement in access to essential medicines and vaccines for patients could result in saving more than 10 million lives within one year. The WHO estimates that the share of people lacking access to medicines has fallen since 1975, when half of the world's population lacked sufficient access to essential medicines to a third of the world's population in 1999. However, due to a rise in the world's population, the absolute number of people lacking access has not changed much and is still at around 1.7 billion. The majority of patients lacking access, around 80% (that is 1.3 billion people) live in low-income countries. Developing countries are disproportionately affected due to high disease burdens, lack of resources, poor health care systems, and no or insufficient research and development targeted at diseases mainly prevalent in developing countries. In the developing world, and especially Sub-Saharan Africa mortality rates are high due to the large number of people falling ill to infectious diseases, like AIDS which is responsible for 19% of all deaths. Other diseases like malaria, pneumonia, diarrhoea, measles and tuberculosis also claim many lives. Although life expectancy rates have increased in the last century, they vary greatly in different regions of the world. It is the developing world that suffers most from these kinds of infectious diseases. Therefore the focus of this dissertation is on access within the context of developing countries.