Health ministers from around the world will try next week to bridge differences over how to overhaul patent rules that developing countries say make life-saving medicines costly and inaccessible, Reuters writes.

The World Health Organization has struggled to encourage the development of effective, affordable treatments for parasites and tropical diseases that have long been overlooked by pharma. A draft WHO plan proposed two years ago was rejected by both pharma and ooor nations as inadequate, and failing to balance competing claims for lower prices and incentives for developing costly treatments.

Earlier this month, an intergovernmental group convened to address those problems failed to agree on alternatives to the prevailing patent system that gives drugmakers the exclusive right to sell meds they develop over a fixed period of time.

WHO spokesman Bill Kean said health ministers attending the United Nations agency’s annual World Health Assembly will try to iron out disagreements that have impeded progress. “Some of these (differences) we really do think will be sorted out during the WHA,” he told a news briefing in Geneva.

Development activists also see the May 19-24 meetings as a critical moment for the drug access issue, which has also been taken up by the World Trade Organization in an agreement that makes allowances for developing countries to create or buy copycat versions of patented drugs.

The WTO’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS, accord has been criticized as too limited to cope with the problems poor countries face accessing meds to fight HIV, malaria
and other diseases that kill, blind and disable millions of people each year.

“It is now up to the World Health Assembly in May to translate bold ideas into concrete action,” Doctors Without Borders said in a statement. “What we need to see is a wider, more ambitious framework for R&D and political leadership, in particular from WHO.”

The US and other wealthy nations have resisted a wholesale reform of intellectual property rules, which offer companies a return on their large investments into developing new drugs, and help protect
against counterfeits.

The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations has called patent
protections key to health innovation. Strong health care systems, efficient markets and adequate regs are also needed to ensure people get the treatments they need, says IFPMA director Harvey Bale.

“It is important to have a stable, enabling policy environment in each of these areas to ensure a sustained flow of new medicines for the benefit of patients worldwide,” he says in a statement.

In addition to the patent question, delegates from the WHO’s 193 member states will consider next week how the U.N. agency should proceed in its efforts to confront the threat of pandemic flu,
eradicate polio and fight obesity and diabetes.

They will also examine the links between climate change and health, assess progress in achieving U.N. goals on reducing child mortality and malnutrition, and consider ways to work more effectively with
other international agencies, Kean said.

The WHO leads the development of global public health policy, including issuing advisories on which vaccines people need for international travel and guidance for countries coping with disease
outbreaks or other emergencies.

It also collaborates with financing bodies such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the GAVI Alliance and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help improve standards of health care, especially in poor parts of the world.