Plenary session Thursday 19 November
Chair: Judith Whitworth, WHO Global Advisory Committee on Health Research

Laurie Garrett, author and journalist, led off Thursday’s plenary session with a discussion of the need for increased investment in capacity building, particularly the training of health care workers. Global health programs lack an exit strategy as all are building with no end point in sight. Charity is easy but maintenance and innovation are the hard part. Donors must ensure that programs are informed by accurate data.

Rifat Atun, director of strategy performance and evaluation officer, said that the global community is not innovating enough and needs to make sure that what is invented is used. To do that, we need an “innovation ecosystem” that not only encourages invention but also the adoption of new evidence. Currently, the latter is very poor. Innovation in the biosciences presents unique challenges owing to the need for expertise from a broad range of disciplines. In order to enable innovation in the biosciences countries must nurture universities, where the majority of science and knowledge transfer takes place.

Representing the Institutes of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr Maria Freire, President of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation, took the floor. In 2008 the Institutes of Medicine decided to make the case to the new President of the U.S. of the importance of investment in global health and what the five main goals of the investment should be: to promote and sustain the investment in global health that the U.S. has already made; to generate a shared knowledge to address health problems endemic to the poor and expand research on health systems; to invest in people, institutions and capacity building; to increase the U.S. commitment to global health by spending $15 billion by 2012; to set an example of engaging in respectful partnerships. The U.S. should also make good on its commitment to the WHO.

Reynaldo Camaras, Secretary of the Minister of Health of Brazil, discussed access to medicines in low- and middle-income countries. Why do people in the developing world still lack access to essential medicines? This is chiefly attributable to the lack of adequately structured national health systems. Private companies, charitable institutions and foreign governments can only do so much. Only a national government can provide sustainable access to quality medicines. Another important barrier to access is the cost of new medicines. Developed countries will continue to push for a so-called anti-counterfeit agenda, which inhibits access on the grounds of intellectual property right violations. To avoid deepening of constraints to access, the international community should join Brazil in saying “no more TRIPS plus measures.”