By Laura MacInnis
Sat May 24, 2:24 PM ET



GENEVA (Reuters) - The World Health Organization's member governments overcame a rich-poor rift over how to manage intellectual property on Saturday and endorsed a strategy to help developing countries access more life-saving medicines.

At the United Nations agency's annual policy-setting meeting in Geneva, governments also called for WHO Director-General Margaret Chan to finalize a plan of action boosting incentives for drug makers to tackle diseases that mainly afflict the poor.

"This is a major breakthrough for public health that will benefit many millions of people for many years to come," Chan said at the end of the week-long World Health Assembly meetings.

The intellectual property resolution requests that Chan, who succeeded Lee Jong-wook as WHO chief in 2006, "finalize urgently the outstanding components of the plan of actions, including time-frames, progress indications and estimated funding needs."

Those will be reviewed at the next WHO assembly in May 2009.

Public health activists applauded the hard-fought consensus reached by the 190 countries represented in the Geneva talks.

"The WHO has taken a big step forward to change the way we think about innovation and access to medicines," said James Love of Knowledge Ecology International, who noted accord "on topics that were considered controversial only a short time ago."

Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) said it was pleased with the WHO's efforts to tackle intellectual property, which spans patents, copyright and trademarks.

"Some important steps in the right direction have been made," Tido von Schoen-Angerer, the humanitarian group's director for access to essential medicines, said. He urged the WHO to support new incentives for drug makers, such as a prize fund for creating diagnostic tests for tuberculosis.

BUSINESS, DEVELOPMENT, HEALTH

Intellectual property lies at the cross-section of business, development, and health issues. The WHO's membership has been split over about how and whether to revamp the prevailing patent system, which critics argue make drugs unaffordable to many.

Two years ago, the WHO's member states set up a working group to assess research and development shortfalls in health, and ways to ensure more poor people can access the life-saving drugs, diagnostic tests and medical equipment they need.

Stark differences in opinion between rich and poor countries on issues including the fairness of patents blocked consensus in that working group, whose "draft global strategy on public health, innovation and intellectual property" was ultimately adopted by WHO members on Saturday.

Developing countries say pharmaceutical companies now invest large sums to create treatments that wealthy consumers will spend money on -- such as remedies for baldness or acne -- while overlooking deadly parasites and tropical diseases that kill, blind and disable millions of impoverished people each year.

The question of drug access has also been taken up by the World Trade Organization in an accord making allowances for poor nations to create or buy copycat versions of patented drugs.

But the WTO's Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights or "TRIPS" agreement has been criticized as too limited for the scale of drug access problems developing countries face.

Wealthy nations have resisted calls to overhaul intellectual property rules, particularly the patents that give companies an exclusive right to sell drugs they develop for a fixed time and for relatively higher prices than generics.

The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, representing major firms including Novartis, Pfizer and Merck, has called such protections critical for the drug-making industry to operate.