Word: africas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...downgrade AIDS from a death sentence to a chronic disease--in countries that can afford the typical $15,000 annual cost per patient. But what about the cash-starved developing world, which currently accounts for nearly 90% of new HIV infections? It's an issue that countries like South Africa and Thailand are struggling with. And a growing number of government health ministers and AIDS activists are proposing an unusual solution: rip off the drug companies...
They're not really stealing, of course, but that's the way U.S. drug companies--backed by Uncle Sam--view a tactic being employed in South Africa and elsewhere. The tactic uses a loophole in the World Trade Organization's Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights agreement to exempt worst-hit countries from patent restrictions on essential drugs. The loophole, Article 31, authorizes emergency use of "compulsory licensing" to produce essential drugs locally as long as royalties are paid. Another tactic: parallel importing, or buying in a country where the needed drugs are cheaper, circumventing artificially high prices...
...hottest debate is in South Africa, where nearly 3.5 million of that country's 40 million citizens are HIV-infected--more than three times the U.S. rate--and 50,000 new HIV cases emerge each month. Drug prices tend to be high, a holdover from apartheid, when price premiums were needed to encourage foreign companies to override sanctions. Says Mojanku Gumbi, an adviser to South Africa's new President, Thabo Mbeki: "This is not about intellectual property rights. It's about pricing structure and segmenting of markets. We are saying that the drug companies can't make the same profits...
...South Africa passed a law last year that gives the Ministry of Health discretion to authorize parallel importing and compulsory licensing in critical situations. But a consortium of 40 drug companies--about a third of them American--filed a suit that has kept the law tied...
...lead in philanthropy, with an offer to give $100 million to fight AIDS in five African countries over the next five years. A sizable chunk is earmarked to bring African doctors to the U.S. so they can be trained to carry out research and clinical trials back in Africa. But even that has raised a red flag among activists. "A lot of the companies are using the cheaper labor costs and the lack of ethical codes in developing countries as a way to get the trials done more cheaply and quickly," says Dan Berman of Doctors Without Borders. A better...