Social pharmaceutical innovation and alternative forms of research, development and deployment for drugs for rare diseases.

Rare diseases are associated with difficulties in addressing unmet medical needs, lack of access to treatment, high prices, evidentiary mismatch, equity, etc. While challenges facing the development of drugs for rare diseases are experienced differently globally (i.e.

Health Inequities and the Shifting Paradigms of Food Security, Food Insecurity, and Food Sovereignty.

Global hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition are on the rise, partly resulting in furthering health inequities between classes and groups of peoples among and within countries. A systematic understanding of the links between inequities in food politics and health issues is a challenge, and it is partly complicated by the presence of 3 contending and shifting paradigms in food politics, namely, food security, food insecurity, and food sovereignty. These paradigms suggest competing views as to the causes of and solutions to hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Intellectual Property Rights Within NAFTA 1.0: Implications for NAFTA 2.0 and for Democratic (Health) Governance in Canada.

In 1993, the Canadian federal government ratified the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Prior to ratification, compulsory licensing was eliminated from Canada's Patent Act and intellectual property rights (IPRs) were strengthened. Compulsory licensing allows competitors to produce drugs under patent without the consent of the patent holder, challenging drug monopolies and lowering prices, whereas IPRs lengthen patent protections, shielding patent holders from competition and increasing prices.