Ahead of US President Barack Obama’s visit to India, international aid organisation, Doctors Without Borders, Medecins Sans Frontieres - MSF, expressed deep concern over the US government’s heightened efforts to undermine access to affordable medicines from India.

Millions of people across the globe rely on Indian low-cost generics, just as MSF relies on these to carry out its medical work across the world.

“The US has been scaling up pressure on India and increasing visits to the country over the last several months in order to aggressively campaign against India’s patent law,” MSF said in a statement today.

“The country’s law sets a high bar for what merits a patent in an effort to prevent abusive pharmaceutical patenting practices. The US is pushing for India to adopt intellectual property (IP) measures similar to those common in the US and EU, which would ultimately result in unaffordable medicine prices for India,” the statement said.

“The alarm bells should be going off for the new Indian government. The US is pushing India to play by its rules on intellectual property, which we know will lead to medicines being priced out of reach for millions of people,” said Dr Manica Balasegaram, Executive Director of MSF’s Access Campaign.

“US pressure already appears to be having an impact: the new Indian government has been delaying a decision to allow generic production of an exorbitantly-priced patented anti-cancer medicine that is unaffordable in the country—an action recommended by a Health Ministry to increase access to affordable versions.

A compulsory licence’ issued by the patent controller in 2012 for an unaffordable cancer drug brought its price down by 97 per cent almost instantly, Balasegaram said.

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