Da saúde internacional à saúde global: trajetórias históricas e geográficas do conceito de medicamentos essenciais.

Abstract

The issues surrounding the place of medicines in public health have been the focus of important discussions. Since the 1970s, third-world states have led the World Health Organization (WHO) to address the issue, which has given rise to the first list of essential drugs in a markedly state-centric and multilateral health governance arrangement. With the signing of the TRIPs Agreement and the consolidation of the HIV epidemic as a problem of worldwide proportions, in the 1990s the concept of essential medicine takes on new shapes, and is challenged in global health governance under the aegis of multistakeholderism. The objective of this thesis is to study the historical and geographical trajectories of the essential drugs concept, in the transition from international health to global health. We use the concepts of "governance" and "health governance" as well as studies of the so-called "international / global health" field and the Critical Theory of International Relations to delineate the political and economic contexts that underpin the concept under analysis. We started with specialized literature, to which we aggregated the information withdrawn from interviews with key actors, as well as research in the WHO archives Headquarters in Geneva. In the first chapter, we characterize International Health, we study the birth of the essential medicines list of the WHO, based on multilateralism and the state-centric, and point out the signs that indicate the transition to Global Health. In the second chapter, we describe the rise of neoliberalism, the crisis of the State and of the WHO s itself to characterize Global Health as multistakeholder environment, formed by an assemblage of "actors". We discuss the different meanings attributed to the concept of essential drugs and analyze the performance of civil society organizations in re-politicizing the concept. The third chapter looks at the case of sofosbuvir, a drug to treat Hepatitis C, and its implications for health governance and essential medicines. The study allowed us to conclude that the inclusion of sofosbuvir in the WHO essential medicines list in 2015 derives from the political processes initiated in 2001. We argue that the case in question determined historical displacements and triggered geographic rearrangements in the North-South dynamics, regarding the issue of access to medicines.