Quote:
This week, in one of the glittering courthouses of the new India, a judge will continue to weigh a case that, at first glance, looks dry and technical, but is, in fact, wet with blood. The verdict will determine whether millions of human beings - from the tip of South America to the top of Africa - live or die.
India today is the developing world's branch of Boots, the place where the poorest people on earth get their medicines. This is because it is the only country willing to manufacture cheap copies of corporate-owned drug treatments for cancer, Aids and other killers, and big enough to do it. Their policy has brought the cost of treating a woman with Aids in subSaharan Africa crashing down from an impossible $10,000 a year in 2000 to a still-tough-but-possible $130 a year today.
They can only save so much money - and so many lives - because the Indian government insists it will only pay money to the multibillion-dollar corporations which own the drug patents if they can show they really have created something genuinely new. Most of the time, they can't - so the Indians sell them to the poor at cost-price.
The court case currently wending through the Indian justice system, launched by the Swiss phramaceutical company Novartis, is an attempt to close down the poor's world pharmacy. Novartis has created a slightly different version of its leukaemia drug, Gleevec, and the pharma giant is trying to force the Indian government to allow it to be patented. The Indian government says the drug isn't really new, enabling Novartis to keep the patent "evergreen" and continue raking in the profits.
If Novartis succeeds, the developing world will hit a "pharmageddon", with drug supplies drying up to dying people. Aids drugs will be particularly vulnerable to this evergreen patenting, since they have to be regularly tweaked to deal with an evolving virus. The panicking aid agency Médicin Sans Frontières (MSF) - who treat 80,000 people in Africa with cheap Indian generics - warn it could mean "the end of affordable medicines in developing countries".
India today is the developing world's branch of Boots, the place where the poorest people on earth get their medicines. This is because it is the only country willing to manufacture cheap copies of corporate-owned drug treatments for cancer, Aids and other killers, and big enough to do it. Their policy has brought the cost of treating a woman with Aids in subSaharan Africa crashing down from an impossible $10,000 a year in 2000 to a still-tough-but-possible $130 a year today.
They can only save so much money - and so many lives - because the Indian government insists it will only pay money to the multibillion-dollar corporations which own the drug patents if they can show they really have created something genuinely new. Most of the time, they can't - so the Indians sell them to the poor at cost-price.
The court case currently wending through the Indian justice system, launched by the Swiss phramaceutical company Novartis, is an attempt to close down the poor's world pharmacy. Novartis has created a slightly different version of its leukaemia drug, Gleevec, and the pharma giant is trying to force the Indian government to allow it to be patented. The Indian government says the drug isn't really new, enabling Novartis to keep the patent "evergreen" and continue raking in the profits.
If Novartis succeeds, the developing world will hit a "pharmageddon", with drug supplies drying up to dying people. Aids drugs will be particularly vulnerable to this evergreen patenting, since they have to be regularly tweaked to deal with an evolving virus. The panicking aid agency Médicin Sans Frontières (MSF) - who treat 80,000 people in Africa with cheap Indian generics - warn it could mean "the end of affordable medicines in developing countries".
This is one of the most shocking things going on at the moment in the world. Drug companies are killing the most vulnerable people on the planet because of these patents.
Read the rest of the article I linked, it's really intresting.
And if you can't be ****** then you can always go here.
This WILL help. In 2001, Novartis was one of 39 companies that tried to prevent South Africa from using cheap generic anti-AIDS drugs. And because of a mass campaign and public pressure, those companies dropped that case.