WHO, WIPO, and Wagner

So here I am in Geneva, taking a class through NYU on Global Public Health. And we're acting like such UN groupies. We spent Monday at the ICRC, Tuesday at the WHO, and this morning at WIPO (world intellectual property organization--who knew?).

Geneva is, of course, lovely. It is a cozy, relatively multi-cultural city, and one that seems to blend both the lovely old Europe style with a very diverse population of ex-pats from the UN and migrant workers from everywhere else. It's rare that an European city does it well--I'm jaded on the subject from so much time over here--and from what I've seen on the admitted surface of Geneva it seems to get along better than other cities.

The ICRC was, unfortunately, a big disappointment, mostly due to our speaker. I really wanted to press someone on the issue of neutrality. What was the ICRC's position on Rwandan refugee camps, when other groups pulled out because they realized they were aiding people who had committed genocide? How far can one take the topic of neutrality--and is there such a thing in so many of today's modern conflicts? Sadly, topics I will have to explore on my own, so it seems.

WHO was much better. We spent a lot of time on malaria and also on non-communicable diseases. We don't think about them too much in the context of developing countries, but cancer, diabetes, hypertension, and other things you can't catch are a growing problem in the developing world, largely because the treatment we get in the developed world just aren't afforable to people elsewhere.

Which actually ties into the topic of my research here: the lack of opiods for palliative care in the developing world. Between late-stage AIDS, rising cancer rates, and an utter lack of diagnostic or surgical care in many developing countries, palliative care is needed yet terribly lacking. Something like 3 countries in the developed world consume 85% of the world's opioids, even though they are grown in India and--hello--Afghanistan. Morphine is listed by the WHO as an esstential medicine, but burdensome regulations and misinformation in the medical community prevent their use in many places where people suffer from stages of cancer and AIDS that the developed world doesn't see too much of anymore. People die in agony. More of this happy topic later once I post my paper, but here is a link to the article that woke me up to this issue.

At WIPO today we heard from someone working on the issue of patents and IP issues of folklore, local medicine, culture, and biological material. That was a highlight. One of the big issues in health care equity and ethics is what to do when developing countries provide the raw material for influenza vaccines but developed countries develop the actual "flu shots." Shouldn't the countries that provided the virus receive a supply of the vaccine that otherwise they couldn't afford? How can developed countries and their pharma companies place patents on medicines from plants in the developing world that have been used by communities for generations? We often only think of patent issues when it comes to AIDS medications but it goes far deeper than that.

Tomorrow we go to UNHCR, which I am ridicuously exicted about, having spent several years working for a refugee organization. More on that later. Right now it's back to the EuroCup, which everyone around here is utterly transfixed by, and rooting for underdog Turkey.