Development, access to medicines and the Ebola virus epidemic in west Africa

The 2014 West African Ebola outbreak constituted a social and economic development challenge, at the core of which was the enduring and unresolved problem of global access to medicines. The Ebola outbreak provided strong evidence of the world’s unpreparedness for the socio-economic challenges of a large-scale pandemic and served as a poignant reminder that using intellectual property regulations to perpetrate a formidable access to medicines’ regime can put global public health in serious jeopardy. This article highlights the connection between the access to medicines conundrum and the right to development against the backdrop of the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak. It argues that diseases ravaging populations in developing countries has a ricochet effect on global public health as well as global security, and as such there is a need for more international co-operation in stemming the tide of such pandemics. © 2016 Thomson Head Office.