"This week delegates from about 100 member countries of the World Health Organization are meeting in Buenos Aires with the aim of strengthening defenses against substandard and fraudulent medicines," Amir Attaran of the University of Ottawa and Roger Bate, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, write in a New York Times opinion piece. "The meeting is extremely important, but to make progress a number of hurdles will have to be overcome," they say, noting a paper recently published in the BMJ outlines such challenges. "In Buenos Aires, the delegates first need to agree which medicines are good and which are bad," the authors say, adding, "[C]ountries need to agree that protecting intellectual property and public health are two different things." Unless countries define the "difference between honest drug companies that sell accidentally substandard medicines, and organized criminals who sell a deliberately falsified ... drug," then "criminals will continue to slip through loopholes and honest companies, pharmacists and doctors will find themselves prosecuted unjustly," they write.