Word: achmat
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...same time the AIDS rebels hit on another front. The tac's chairman, Zackie Achmat, went to Brazil to obtain a consignment of cheap, generic antiretroviral drugs for a program of treatment of 85 HIV/AIDS victims, adults and children, in the black township of Khayelitsha, outside of Cape Town. Achmat's shopping trip to Brazil was in open defiance of South Africa's patents law. "Potentially we face a civil action from the drugs companies," said Achmat last week. "We'll just have to wait and see." But public opinion is so firmly behind the activists that drugmakers in South...
...industry faces clamorous opposition. Thousands of protesters have taken to South Africa's streets, and a petition signed by 160 organizations and 35 countries calls the lawsuit "morally reprehensible." The E.U. has called on the drug companies to drop it. "This is the first time," says Zackie Achmat, leader of South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign, "that the pharmaceutical industry will have to justify to the world why their prices are so high and why patents should be so aggressively protected when cheaper drugs exist...
...Achmat's moral example goes a lot further, sometimes to the consternation of his colleagues in the Treatment Action Group. The 38-year-old gay filmmaker is HIV-positive, and his doctors have urged him to begin taking antiretrovirals, which are affordable for someone in Achmat's economic bracket. But he refuses to take the drugs until they're available to all South African AIDS patients through the public health system. Friends and colleagues have urged him to relent, because he's too important to the campaign. He almost did last year - but balked at the last minute, unable...
...Still, Zackie Achmat is not expecting to die. He's hoping the drugs will be available to all South African AIDS sufferers within three years, and he thinks he can survive that long. And, of course, that gives him a deeply personal stake in winning his campaign. One South African reporter, commending Achmat on his noble stand, drew a withering response: "I don't think it's noble, I think it's dumb," Achmat answered. "But it's a conscience issue. It's not something I advocate for anyone else...
...Even before they surrendered in their courtroom battle to stop generic imports, the pharmaceutical corporations had lost their case in the court of public opinion - in no small measure due to the efforts of Achmat and his fellow campaigners. Still, the battle isn't over. Now that the drug companies have stepped aside from the dispute over importing generics, Achmat and his colleagues will have to fight to convince the South African government to commit billions of dollars to the fight to keep almost 5 million AIDS patients alive. And for Achmat, as much as any of them, the clock...