Stephen Pollard: Copycat medicine recipe for disaster

COMMENT

LONDON - Have you got your copy of the pirated Jamie Oliver cookbook, The Naked Chef 2?

Recipes ranging from "monkfish wrapped in banana leaves with ginger, cilantro, chilli and coconut milk" to "roasted sweet garlic and thyme risotto with toasted almonds and breadcrumbs", all with a fetching picture of Jamie on the front.

If you've got it, too bad. It's a hoax. No new book is on the way, and the pirated offering is merely a compilation of recipes he has already published.

But fun as it might seem - and who wouldn't want a free recipe for "summer fruit and prosecco jelly" - this prank is based on an idea that threatens to condemn millions more Aids sufferers to death, and undermines efforts to cure cancer.

The idea is that intellectual property doesn't matter.

The spoof book is, after all, theft - of Jamie Oliver's ideas. Those ideas have made him a rich man for one simple reason - they are popular.

When he publishes a book, its success depends on whether people like what he has to offer.

Clearly, they do. And that's why he comes up with new recipes. To make more money.

But if everything he wrote was handed over for free - stolen from him, like the hoax book, or because intellectual property was no longer protected by law - we would almost certainly have seen the last of Jamie Oliver.

He would have no incentive to keep inventing new recipes.

If you don't like The Naked Chef, that might be no big loss. But what if that logic was applied to something where the choice is less frivolous - Aids cures, or other medicines?

Next month in Cancun, Mexico, the World Trade Organisation is meeting to discuss precisely that proposal.

At the last such meeting, in Doha, two years ago, there was a declaration that the world's poorest countries should be allowed to ignore patents when they were facing epidemics such as HIV, malaria or TB.

Who, after all, could stand by and watch in such emergencies?

Certainly not the drug companies, who backed the proposal - hardly surprising, since they already gave away many such drugs when the need arose.

But it is not, however, that straightforward.

The anti-globalisation movement has long targeted intellectual property as representing all that its members wish to destroy.

On their own, the arguments they advance are easily rebutted.

They say, for instance, that the real problem in the developing world is that essential medicines are patented and the costs deny them to the poor.

Yet almost none of the relevant medicines is patented.

At last month's international Aids conference in Paris, Amir Attaran of Harvard University published a report saying "essential medicines are rarely patented in developing countries".

His paper shows that 98.7 per of the World Health Organisation's list of 325 essential drugs are not patented. So the fulminating over patents concerns 1.3 per cent of the real issue.

WHO director-general Dr Jong-Wook Lee indicated the real problem in a discussion on his organisation's goal of providing antiretroviral drugs to three million HIV-positive people in developing countries by 2005.

"It is not just the issue of money, because clearly if all the money and all the drugs were available today, I doubt whether we could implement it right now because of the weak infrastructures, such as the shortage of nurses and doctors," he said.

Many poor countries cannot distribute medicines or even diagnose disease.

Since the Doha declaration two years ago, the list of supposed justifications for ignoring patents has grown longer.

The reason is that countries such as Brazil, India and Argentina do not respect patents and have large pirate pharmaceutical industries seeking new markets.

They want countries to be able to declare self-determined epidemics, however ridiculous - erectile dysfunction, for instance - and then be able to import generic (copycat) drugs.

These are not arcane, technical issues but arguments which will have a direct bearing on our ability to conquer illness.

It is already possible to see what will happen if intellectual property protection is destroyed.

India's 20,000-plus drug makers churn out cheap copies of Viagra and Rogaine for rich city dwellers and treat less than 1 per cent of the country's 4 million HIV cases.

The pharmaceutical industry spends vast sums on research and development. Without patents, which make possible a return on such investments, that research would not happen.

The losers would be the millions of Aids and cancer sufferers who would no longer have the hope of a cure.

Poorer countries would also lose any incentive to develop research-based drug industries of their own.

Today's crusade against drug patents is the sharp end of a broader assault on intellectual property and capitalism.

The hoax Jamie Oliver book may seem like a joke, but taken any further it will kill millions.

- INDEPENDENT