Devil is in the details
an informal round of World Trade Organisation (wto) talks was held in Sydney, Australia on November 14 and 15, 2002. A select group of 25 countries including Brazil, China, India, Senegal, the eu and the us attended the talks. The issue of developing countries' access to inexpensive medicines, enabling them to tackle public health problems, pushed aside every other item on the agenda. At the meeting trade ministers agreed that poor countries, which didn't have the capacity to manufacture expensive drugs, had the right to import generic drugs. (Generic drugs are copies of branded ones whose patent has expired; they are cheaper and hence more accessible.)
But important details were left unresolved. Which diseases qualified as
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