One step towards access to medicine for all?

Last weekend, Oxfam welcomed Glaxo Smith Kleine's (GSK) announcement to improve the company's approach to access to medicines. If these words are backed up with action then we will have taken a first step towards achieving access to medicine for all.

Much has changed since Oxfam started campaigning on access to medicines eight years ago. In 2000 we tussled with companies to even acknowledge the access to medicines crisis, in the midst of companies charging exorbitant prices for anti-retroviral medicines and blocking the entry of cheap, generic medicines.

More recently, we tussled with Novartis over the right of India, as pharmacy of the developing world, to ensure its low-cost manufacturers could produce and export affordable, generic medicines across the developing world. And most recently Oxfam has called on governments to establish a patent pool so people living in poverty can access new anti retroviral medicines at affordable prices. Our resolve has been tested and you're campaigning has helped to shift the debate massively in favour of poor people.

For years, we have asked companies to acknowledge that all medicines, whether it is to treat HIV and AIDS or cancer, matter to people in poverty. For years, pharmaceutical companies have insisted that only a few diseases matter to the poor - especially AIDS, TB and malaria, despite the fact that other diseases, such as heart disease and diabetes, are now causing massive suffering in poor countries.

Yet last week GSK announced price reductions for all its medicines in the world's poorest countries, meaning that a company has finally agreed with Oxfam that all diseases matter to the developing world. While it is an important announcement, we need to push GSK to go further by extending these offers to all developing countries, and by ensuring that generic competition, where needed to lower prices even further than what GSK can offer, is not prevented.

Andrew Witty, CEO of GSK has also announced that GSK would establish a patent pool for neglected disease research. Neglected diseases don't make the headlines, because they are diseases that do not affect you and me. It is exciting that GSK has accepted the concept of a patent pool, but they must do more to extend the concept of a patent pool to medicines to treat HIV and AIDS, and use the patent pool to expand access, and not just innovation.

Recently, 3,000 Oxfam campaigners told the government that we wanted them to back the idea of a patent pool. Now the world's second largest pharmaceutical company is on board. Now we can push GSK to expand the concept of patent pools to anti-retroviral medicines, while also pushing other pharmaceutical companies and governments to support this concept.

Now is the time to campaign harder. Patent pools will mean a lot for poor people, but unless GSK and other companies do more, we will not achieve universal access to medicines.

I hope that this announcement acts as an important first step and that governments and other pharmaceutical companies will be challenged to go further. It's taken us 8 years to get this far. It's not time to start the celebrations yet - but we'll keep campaigning until the pharmaceutical industry finally works to the benefit of all.

Rohit Malpani is an Oxfam policy advisor on access to medicines