Amir Attaran

Dr. Amir Attaran is a lawyer (LL.B., University of British Columbia) and immunologist (DPhil, Oxford) who writes on public health and global development issues. He has been published in journals such as Nature, the Lancet, the Journal of the American Medicial Association, the Yale International Law Journal, and also in the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, and other publications.

Among his coauthors and those who have shared his views on human rights and development are Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi[1] and Jeffrey Sachs [2].

Attaran is a frequent critic of the unaccountability and poor performance of what he has called the "foreign aid industrial complex", and organizations such as USAID, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and although his work with Sachs inspired it, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. In several notable instances, his criticisms, which were initially rejected, were later agreed to by the foreign aid industrial complex. Attaran led a team of scientists in a seminal 2004 paper in The Lancet which forced the international aid donors to cease treating malaria with obsolete and ineffective drugs (chloroquine) and to instead use newer and highly effective artemisinin combination therapies, which WHO now agrees has saved a large number of childrens' lives[3]. Attaran also started the international campaign, which involved hundreds of scientists and Nobel laureates, to restore the indoors use of DDT in malaria control, and is credited with drafting the compromise in the Stockholm Convention which prohibited the ecotoxic use of DDT in agriculture, but allowed the life-saving use of DDT in public health [4].

Interestingly, in both the artemisinin combination therapy and the DDT cases, the WHO and other UN agencies now agree with Attaran and have come out in suppport of these tools being used. These and other successful campaigns to raise the standard of care for poor people in the world led the science journal Nature Medicine in 2006 to describe Attaran as "a master at bringing global health agencies to task"[5].

Dr. Attaran is also a forceful human rights advocate, having called for international prosecutions to end the crimes against humanity perpetuated by the regime in Zimbabwe[6], and recently having joined with NGOs to criticize Canada's military for failing to protect the rights of detainees they arrest during their mission in Afghanistan[7]. He is credited with the discovery that detainees captured by the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan have been transferred to the custody of Afghan security officials known by the Canadian government to be involved in torture[8].

Dr. Attaran has been a paid consultant to NGOs (e.g. Doctors Without Borders), the United Nations (e.g. the UNDP), the pharmaceutical industry (e.g. Novartis), and an unpaid consultant when requested by various developing country governments (e.g. Brazil, Malawi) and human rights groups (e.g. Amnesty International).

He is currently Associate Professor of Law and Population Health, and the holder of the Canada Research Chair in Law, Population Health and Global Development Policy at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Previously he was an adjunct lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University, publishing research as part of the Center for International Development and the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

He is a board member of Africa Fighting Malaria, a group funded in part by the American Enterprise Institute. He has been a vocal critic against the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders in its campaign information on drug patents and medicine access, but has also worked together with them to advance other issues such as the right of malaria patients to artemisinin combination therapy, a cause that MSF strongly supports [9].

References

• Royal Institute of International Affairs, Dr Amir Attaran, biography, accessed February 2004.
• Patent Politics, TAGline, Volume 8, Issue 9, November 2001.
• AIDS Activists Laud Pharmacia Plan for Generic Manufacturing", Dow Jones International: January 24, 2003.
• Consumer Project on Technology, Big Pharma's favorite academics and opinion makers, accessed February 2004.
• A Critique of Amir Attaran's claims about patents and medicine access, [10], [11], [12].