India-United States Partnership on Health

There is a special importance of health sector in India United States relations and it ranges from partnering on R&D of vaccines to implementation of disease detection centres. This article presents an overview of India-US partnership in health and pharma sector.

Overview of Various Initiatives

• On global level, both the countries have partnered to increase global capacity, resources and coordination necessary to tangibly reduce threats posed by infectious disease outbreaks, for example Ebola.
• Towards ending preventable Child and Maternal deaths, both India and United States co-convenors of “Global Call to Action“. {India is one of the top four countries accounting for 50% of global under five mortality. In this context, India had co-convened a Global Call to Action on Child survival in June 2012}. called for an accelerated response to promote child survival. USAID and UNICEF supported the process, with Indian ministries in the lead, to plan and organize this landmark summit. Summit outcomes included the launch of the Reproductive, Maternal, Neonatal, Child, and Adolescent Health (RMNCH+A) Roadmap and a national and state scorecard and dashboard to track progress.
• Further, the two countries had created “Health Initiative” in 2010 co-chaired by India’s health minister and US Secretary of Human and Health services. This is a platform to discuss bilateral issues on health collaboration and implementation.
• In 2012, the Global Disease Detection-India Centre was launched in India in collaboration with United States. It focuses on food borne diseases, emergency operations, zoonotic diseases, public health laboratory systems, disease surveillance, epidemiology and acute encephalitis.
• In 2012, India National Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) (India IES) was launched. The first batch of EIS officers are being trained in field epidemiology and participating in outbreak investigations. The two countries are also cooperating on human and avian influenza and other emerging infectious diseases.
• Rotavirus causes an estimated 78,000 deaths, 800,000 hospitalizations, and 3 million episodes of severe diarrhea each year in Indian children. Rotavac, a low cost rotavirus vaccine that has been recommended in India for routine immunizations, is the product of a longstanding Indo-U.S. Vaccine Action Program collaboration that includes government, private sector, and academic partners.
• Both the countries are also collaborating on various levels with respect to Global Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs), Cancer Research and other Innovative Partnerships and Development Challenges.

Key Issues

The major issue between the two countries is on pharma related intellectual property rights, particularly compulsory licensing. The issue US business lobby accuses India of rampant piracy and counterfeiting in the name of generic drugs. Further, India’s compulsory license regime forces the intellectual property owners to license out their statutorily granted right to interested third parties capable of manufacturing the patented product at cheaper prices {Read here in detail}. The Indian patent law while gives adequate protection to the genuine inventions, also rejects inventions that make only superficial changes in existing drugs {evergreening of patents}.