32,478 research outputs found
The Doha Declaration Ten Years on and Its Impact on Access to Medicines and the Right to Health
Access to medicines is a human right, enshrined in legally binding international human rights treaties, select regional agreements and numerous national constitutions. The realization of access to medicines, including antiretroviral treatment, as part of the human right to health depends heavily on the legal framework for the production and distribution of medicines, including intellectual property rights. The adoption of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement) within the framework of the World Trade Organization (WTO) changed dramatically the international landscape with regard to intellectual property, particularly in relation to access to medicines. Although one of the stated goals of the TRI PS Agreement was “to reduce tensions arising from intellectual property protection”, the possible conflict between such protection and essential public health objectives, particularly access to medicines, moved developing-country WTO Member States to request the Council for TRIPS to specifically consider the relationship between the TRI PS Agreement and public health in general, and access to medicines more specifically. After negotiations, in 2001 the 4th WTO Ministerial Conference adopted the Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health. This Discussion Paper briefly describes the content of the Doha Declaration and examines its implications for the realization of the right to health. The Paper discusses a number of repercussions of the Doha Declaration with regard to the international discourse on the right to health and access to medicines, and its implications within the WTO system and for national legislation. It presents some examples of use of the flexibilities confirmed by the Doha Declaration, and discusses the issue of compulsory licences with regard to patents relating to products for non-communicable diseases. Finally, a number of conclusions and recommendations are presented
The Star Formation Histories and Efficiencies of Two Giant HII Regions in M33
photometry is used to re-identify the OB associations which power the
two most luminous HII regions in M33, NGC 604 and NGC 595. There is a
significant difference (2-3 Myr) in the ages of the most recent star formation
episode in these two regions, while NGC 595 also has undergone a prior episode
of star formation (10-15 Myr ago). These data, combined with the presence of
molecular clouds in the heart of NGC 604, suggest that molecular clouds may
survive at least one intense episode of massive star formation. The star
formation efficiencies (mass of stars per mass of gas) of these two HII regions
are up to a factor of 3 larger than the average efficiency in the inner disk of
M33 or in Galactic molecular clouds, but are still only 2-5\%.Comment: 26 pages including 2 figures, uuencoded compressed postscript file
(Figure 1 not available electronically). Accepted to Ap
Variational approximations to homoclinic snaking
We investigate the snaking of localised patterns, seen in numerous physical
applications, using a variational approximation. This method naturally
introduces the exponentially small terms responsible for the snaking structure,
that are not accessible via standard multiple-scales asymptotic techniques. We
obtain the symmetric snaking solutions and the asymmetric 'ladder' states, and
also predict the stability of the localised states. The resulting approximate
formulas for the width of the snaking region show good agreement with numerical
results.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, submitte
Rational Construction of Stochastic Numerical Methods for Molecular Sampling
In this article, we focus on the sampling of the configurational
Gibbs-Boltzmann distribution, that is, the calculation of averages of functions
of the position coordinates of a molecular -body system modelled at constant
temperature. We show how a formal series expansion of the invariant measure of
a Langevin dynamics numerical method can be obtained in a straightforward way
using the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff lemma. We then compare Langevin dynamics
integrators in terms of their invariant distributions and demonstrate a
superconvergence property (4th order accuracy where only 2nd order would be
expected) of one method in the high friction limit; this method, moreover, can
be reduced to a simple modification of the Euler-Maruyama method for Brownian
dynamics involving a non-Markovian (coloured noise) random process. In the
Brownian dynamics case, 2nd order accuracy of the invariant density is
achieved. All methods considered are efficient for molecular applications
(requiring one force evaluation per timestep) and of a simple form. In fully
resolved (long run) molecular dynamics simulations, for our favoured method, we
observe up to two orders of magnitude improvement in configurational sampling
accuracy for given stepsize with no evident reduction in the size of the
largest usable timestep compared to common alternative methods
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