Letter

Dirty fighting in the other drug wars

Dear healthmatters — Further to your report ‘Global pressure leads to falling drug prices’ (issue 44) the pharmaceutical industry is indeed fighting hard – and dirty.

Le Monde (the upmarket French near equivalent of the Guardian) reported on 23 August that German Velasquez, the WHO official in charge of the Action Programme on Essential Medicines, had suffered a series of attacks and was being given police protection at his home on the French side of the border near Geneva.

After being robbed and knifed in Rio de Janeiro on 26 May, he was further attacked in the street at a WHO meeting in Miami by two men who told him to learn the lesson of Rio and stop criticising the pharmaceutical industry.

Two anonymous phone calls to his home have followed with the last one, on 19 June, telling him to stay away from the meeting of the WTO that was discussing rights to health and rights to intellectual property in medicines. He went as deputy for Gro Harlem Brundtland.

Le Monde further reported that Mr Velasquez is joint editor of a WHO booklet on globalisation and access to medicines, which powerfully attacks TRIPS (the WTO’s trade related intellectual property rights agreement). The WHO has been under heavy pressure, mainly from America, to withdraw the booklet and sack Velasquez.

He is also thought to have helped the South African government prepare its successful case against the pharmaceutical industry.

Given the amount of money at stake in exploiting health needs across the world, it is perhaps not surprising that parts of the pharmaceutical industry may end up resorting to crime when the law does not go the way they want, and also not surprising that the case of Mr Velasquez is not widely reported.