Author granted license

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2011

ISSN

1535-3532

Publisher

Yale Law School

Language

en-US

Abstract

The world faces a worsening public health crisis: A growing number of bacteria are resistant to available antibiotics. Yet there are few new antibiotics in the development pipeline to take the place of these increasingly ineffective drugs. We review a number of proposals intended to bolster drug development, including such financial incentives for pharmaceutical manufacturers as extending the effective patent life for new antibiotics. However, such strategies directly conflict with the clear need to reduce unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions and could actually increase prescription use. As an alternative, we recommend a two-prong, “integrated” strategy based on prizes administered through the insurance reimbursement system, but conditioned on the companies meeting conservation targets.

Comments

Boston University School of Law Working Paper No. 10-42

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