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By Theodore MacDonald, 138 pp, $24.02.
Ashland, Ohio, Radcliffe Publishing, 2006.
ISBN-13 978-1-8461-9050-6.

JAMA. 2007;297(20):2288-2289.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

In recently concluded, but still undisclosed, trade agreement negotiations with the United States, the South Korean government demanded the capacity to establish a positive-list cost-effectiveness and reference pricing system (as exists in Australia) that values "innovation" in health care technology, for all citizens, rich and poor alike, by expert evaluation of its "objectively demonstrated therapeutic significance." Yet US negotiators, contrary to resolutions of the Democrat-controlled Congress, resisted this Korean approach and instead imposed a mechanism for "evergreening" pharmaceutical patent royalties likely to impede access by the poor to "essential" generic medicines. Such developments are symptomatic of those carefully highlighted by Theodore MacDonald in Health, Trade and Human Rights.

MacDonald's is a fluidly expressed, well-researched book, deserving the attention of those health professionals and policy makers engaged in the important but Sisyphean task of making the rules of international trade conform to the norms of international human rights and the . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Thomas A. Faunce, LLB, BMed, PhD, Reviewer
Australian National University
Medical School and College of Law
Canberra, Australia
thomas.faunce@anu.edu.au