Never Mind the Epidemic, Who Gets Patent Rights For the Cure?

A virus that has so far killed nearly thirty people in seven countries faces a non-medical obstacle to treatment: Patents. Reader Presto Vivace writes with this excerpt from the Council on Foreign Relations: "At the center of the dispute is a Dutch laboratory that claims all rights to the genetic sequence of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus [MERS-CoV]. Saudi Arabia's deputy health minister, Ziad Memish, told the WHO meeting that "someone"--a reference to Egyptian virologist Ali Zaki--mailed a sample of the new SARS-like virus out of his country without government consent in June 2012, giving it to Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam."

Comments

Re:It's not a patent

[PolygamousRanchKid]

I'll go back to breathing normally now.

. . . not if you get the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus, you won't . . . !