PARLIAMENT introduced a procedure recently known as the 鈥渨ritten ministerial statement鈥�. These are recorded in Hansard 鈥� Parliament鈥檚 official report 鈥� but scarcely anywhere else. It means that some matters that don鈥檛 qualify for a statement in the House of Commons are now recorded, but it can also allow some government decisions to be tucked away where almost no one notices them.
So it was that health minister John Hutton issued a statement on clinical trials of the antidepressant drug paroxetine. The Committee on Safety of Medicines (CSM) found that some 17,000 patients were given doses higher than 20 milligrams in the last year. Hutton reminded prescribers and clinicians that the committee had stipulated a starting dose of 20 milligrams when treating depressive illness. The CSM added that clinical trials showed no evidence of increased efficacy at higher doses and that increasing the dose could be detrimental.
This ministerial statement came just as Charles Medawar of the Public Interest Research Centre in London published his book, Medicines out of Control? Medawar claimed that clinical trials of another antidepressant, Prozac, showed that for the majority of people 5 milligrams was all right, and that increasing it to 20 milligrams benefited only a few more. Yet the company manufacturing the drug produces only 20-milligram tablets.
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INDIGENOUS people are often at the mercy of bio-pirates, who steal their traditional knowledge of medicinal plants. That was the considered view of the UN Convention on Biodiversity, which met in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, recently (快猫短视频, 28 February, p 15).
The unwritten knowledge that indigenous people pass down the generations is rarely recognised by patent regulators. A noteworthy proposal from the UN convention was that confidential databases of traditional knowledge should be set up. The UN called on governments to insist that companies show they have gained prior informed consent from indigenous communities before exploiting plants or crops for commercial gain. I asked Hilary Benn, the secretary for international development, what the UK鈥檚 policy is on helping such people to get their due reward.
Benn replied that the government helped to negotiate a satisfactory mandate for an international regime on access and benefit sharing. This covers traditional knowledge and recognises the need for a balance between facilitating access to genetic resources and sharing benefits. The government is now following up a number of recommendations from the Commission on Intellectual Property Rights 鈥� an independent body set up by the Department for International Development (DFID) in 2001 鈥� to ensure indigenous people are rewarded for their role in husbanding biodiversity and identifying the medicinal, nutritional and other properties of many species.
