Nearly every major pharmaceutical company in the world is suing the government of South Africa in a court case viewed as precedent-setting in the battle to get cheap AIDS medications to many of the world's poorest countries.
More than three dozen companies are arguing that a 1997 South African law allowing the government to import or produce cheap, generic versions of patented drugs is too broad and unfairly targets drug manufacturers. They plan to ask the Pretoria High Court to invalidate the law in hearings which will begin today.
The government, AIDS activists and international human rights groups say the drug companies are trying to wring profits out of a public health nightmare that threatens to devastate South Africa and dozens of other impoverished countries.
The case is about what is more important: "The commercial interests of the companies, or the human rights of the people who are trying to stay alive," said Belinda Coote, regional director of the relief agency Oxfam.
More than 25 million of the 36 million people infected with HIV live in sub-Saharan Africa, one of the world's most impoverished regions. Last year, 2.4 million people in the region died from AIDS.
With little access to the medicines that have turned AIDS from a fatal to a chronic disease in the West, the overwhelming majority of these people -- and the millions infected in other poor countries -- will die from the disease.
These statistics, coupled with the feeling that some drug companies care more about stopping the spread of generic drugs than the spread of HIV, have damaged the industry's standing throughout the world.
"I don't think it's good for their image and I think that a lot of them will just eventually give these drugs away," said Henry Grabowski, professor of economics at Duke University.
Under former President Nelson Mandela, South Africa was criticized for spending millions of dollars of its precious health budget on a controversial AIDS awareness play and developing its own AIDS medication, Virodene, which was found to contain an industrial solvent.
The new government has yet to make a relatively inexpensive course of anti-retroviral medication widely available to pregnant woman to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV.
When South Africa passed a law in 1997 giving the health minister a limited right to import generic versions of patented drugs or license their domestic production, the US government put South Africa on a watch-list for trade sanctions.
The case is not about "patents versus patients" and has little to do with AIDS, said Miryenna Deeb, head of the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association of South Africa, which is party to the lawsuit.
Under the law, the health minister would have the authority to essentially invalidate the patents of any medicine, destroying the companies' profits and their efforts to recoup their costs for developing the drugs, she said.
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