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Africa wants generic Aids drugs
01/12/2003 11:26 - (SA)
Paris - In much of Africa, a trademark is often all that stands between life and death.
Faced with the increasing urgency of caused by major killers such as Aids, tuberculosis and malaria, governments in the region are demanding the right to import generic medicines to replace the branded products from the major pharamaceutical companies that they cannot afford.
African delegates at the first global forum on sustainable development here this weekend berated drugs companies for neglecting the needs of the developing world while pouring out "comfort medicines" for people in the industrialised world, which they would not need if they adopted healthier lifestyles.
Major pandemics "represent one of the principal brakes on the economic development of the African countries," said Algerian Health Minister Mourad Redjimi, who called for the developing countries' debt to be converted into public health programmes.
"We are agitating for the production of generic medicines in our countries," he added at the Paris conference.
Generic products have the same qualities and effects as propriety medicines, without the high cost of a trademarked label. The pharmaceutical companies argue that the high sticker price on their branded products are necessary to recoup the costs of research.
The issue is a specially pertinent one as the world marks world AIDS day on Monday.
The global HIV/Aids epidemic has killed more than three million people in 2003, and an estimated five million more people acquired the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) bringing to 40 million the number of people living with the virus around the world, according to the UN aids program, UNAids.
The rights of the pharmaceutical companies are protected by a World Trade Organisation (WTO) "agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectal property rights."
The accord is a "straitjacket" for the African countries, said Benin's health minister, Yvette-Celine Seignon Kandissounon, because it deprives them of the right of making their own medicines or importing generic pharmaceuticals.
She said Benin has a local company, Pharma-Quick, that is capable of producing generic products "if we were given the right" to do so.
Developing countries can ask for the WTO agreement to be suspended during an epidemic, "but by then it is too late," Seignon said, dismissing the facility as only "a small opening."
Mohamed-Cheikh Biadillah, the Moroccan minister of health, said generic medicines already constitute about one fifth of pharmaceuticals production in his country.
He added that the government was taking good care to protect the national industry in free-trade negotiations with the United States.
Biadillah noted that the pharmaceutical companies were more interested in treating conditions in the industrialised countries that could be avoided by healthier living while failing to invest in the mortal maladies that afflict insolvent nations.
- AFP
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