UN Guidance on Pharmaceutical Companies

Thanks yet again to our colleague Roy Poses over at Health Care Renewal blog for this recent post:
http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2010/09/that-wheel-was-already-invented-un.html

The subject of the post is a 2008 UN Guidance document on management of pharmaceutical companies:
http://www.essex.ac.uk/human_rights_centre/research/rth/docs/GA2008.pdf

--which in turn was the subject of a recent paper:
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1000330

The basic gist of all this is that the UN considers access to necessary medicines a human rights issue, and that in turn places burdens on pharmaceutical companies to conduct business in a manner that's compatible with these basic human rights. Dr. Poses makes two very appropriate points: first, many of us (including me) had no idea that this UN document even existed; second, if drug companies managed their affairs in ways compatible with the UN guidelines, this blog could fold up shop, as almost all the abuses we rail about would disappear.