LSIPR 50 2016: Jarbas Barbosa da Silva Jr and Margaret Chan

Name: Jarbas Barbosa da Silva Jr

Organisation: Brazilian Health Surveillance Agency

Position: Director

Jarbas Barbosa da Silva Jr is director of the Brazilian Health Surveillance Agency (ANVISA). With a master’s degree in medical science and a doctor’s degree in collective health, he has considerable experience in the life sciences industry. He has written more than 70 articles on health services, surveillance, health scenario analysis, and epidemiology as well as having worked for the Pan American Health Organization, where he was responsible for alerting about, and the response to, public health emergencies.

Last year, Brazilian law firm Licks Attorneys discussed in our sister publication World IP Review the role of ANVISA in the use of trademarks for vaccines.

Eduardo Hallak and Viviane Trojan said that the Syndicate of Pharmaceutical Products Industry of São Paulo obtained an important victory that guarantees members the right to use their trademarks while importing and commercialising vaccines in Brazil.

The syndicate filed a lawsuit because of notification 548, issued by ANVISA in February 27, 2002, which prohibited the use of trademarks in vaccines beginning in April of the same year. The act was based on article 5 of decree no. 79.094/1976, which sets forth that “medicines containing a sole active ingredient… cannot display brand names”. However, until the issuance of notification 548, ANVISA (as well as the Secretary of Sanitary Surveillance, which preceded the agency) never enforced the prohibition, they said.

A preliminary injunction was obtained and prevented ANVISA from enforcing article 5 against syndicate members, but a political appeal by ANVISA meant that the injunction was suspended until May 21, 2014, when the syndicate’s request for the provisional enforcement of the final decision on the merits was granted. Since then, the pharma companies in the syndicate have been allowed to import and commercialise vaccines with their trademarks in Brazil.

Barbosa da Silva Jr also sits on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) executive board, and is a member of the board of the Stop TB Partnership and the WHO Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Framework Advisory Group. His extensive international and national involvement in public health management and the prevention and containment of disease marks Barbosa da Silva Jr as an influential individual in the field of life sciences, particularly in Latin America.

Name: Margaret Chan

Organisation: World Health Organization

Position: Director-general

Margaret Chan has worked at the World Health Organization (WHO) since 2003. Her first role was as director of the department for protection of the human environment. Then in 2005 she worked as director of communicable diseases surveillance and response, and as representative of the director-general for pandemic influenza. She became assistant director-general for communicable diseases in the same year. In 2006, she was elected director-general of the WHO and then in 2012 was appointed for a second five-year term.

Chan, who is from China, gained her medical degree from the University of Western Ontario in Canada. Her career in public health began in 1978 when she joined the Hong Kong Department of Health. During her career she has created many new policies, including in 1994 while working at the Hong Kong health department she launched new services to stop the spread of disease and promote better health. She also introduced new initiatives to enhance training for public health professionals and manage outbreaks of avian influenza.

However, she has faced criticism, including in the summer of 2015 about how the WHO had handled the outbreak of the Ebola virus. She said at the time that the virus had overwhelmed the WHO and “shook this organisation to its core”. An independent panel found that despite warnings about the severity of Ebola, in the spring of 2014 the WHO didn’t provide “an effective and adequate response”.

Chan then spoke at the World Health Assembly in May 2015, where she announced new programmes for the WHO including a global health emergency workforce and a unified WHO programme for health emergencies, and she sought a $100 million contingency fund.

“I do not ever again want to see this organisation faced with a situation it is not prepared, staffed, funded, or administratively set up to manage … we will move forward on an urgent footing. I plan to complete these changes by the end of the year,” she added.