The Conflict and Coordination between Pharmaceutical Patent and Public Health

In recent years, with the outbreak and worldwide spread of gravely infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, SARS and bird flu, a series of public health problems have emerged. Transnational public health crisis resulting from shortage of pharmaceuticals in developing countries whose population accounts for three quarters of the world’s total has become a global focus. The conflict between pharmaceutical patent and public health has been intensifying as well and has become an important and pressing issue. It is a complex legal issue and one of the major disputes in intellectual property as to how to balance pharmaceutical patent protection and public health preservation.This paper studies the conflict between pharmaceutical patent protection and public health confronted by developing countries. First, it brings forward pharmaceutical patent and public health problems and analyzes the conflict between them. Then, it reviews the measures taken by WTO to solve the conflict, such as The Doha Declaration and The Implementation of paragraph 6 of the Doha Declaration, and illustrates their deficiencies and limitations. After that, the paper particularly explores the countermeasures developing countries can take so as to coordinate the conflict and relieve public health crisis. In the end, it focuses on putting forward some measures to protect public health in China through analysis of our country’s current public health situation and pharmaceutical patent legislation.