Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report - Thu, 3 May 2001
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Cipla to Provide AIDS Drugs to Nigeria
Indian generic drug manufacturer Cipla Ltd. announced yesterday that
it would supply approximately US$ 3.5 million in AIDS drugs to Nige-
ria, the Wall Street Journal reports (Wall Street Journal, 5/3). The
company has signed a deal with the Nigerian ministry of health and
plans to ship the first consignment out this month. The drugs will
initially reach about 10,000 Nigerian patients at a cost of US$ 350
per patient per year. Cipla Joint Managing Director Amar Lulla said
that the company is "now extending the offer to [other] governments."
Reuters Health reports that the deal comes "at a time when the much
larger South African market for AIDS drugs is opening up to generic
drug makers like Cipla." Analysts estimate that Cipla could sell up
to US$ 50 million in AIDS drugs in South Africa in the first year of
exports (Reuters Health, 5/2).
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Nation Op-Ed Draws Parallels Between Drug Access and Antiapartheid
Movements
The fight to obtain greater access to anti-AIDS drugs garnered a
"broad spectrum of support" among workers, activists and "high-
powered lobbyists" in South Africa, inspiring a social movement and
critique of the government not seen since the demise of the country's
apartheid regime in 1994, Mark Gevisser, the Nation's Southern Africa
correspondent, writes in an op-ed in the magazine. Gevisser gives
much of the credit for this alliance to the South African advocacy
group the Treatment Action Campaign, which "brilliantly mobilized"
South African citizens to fight the lawsuit brought -- and later
dropped -- by 39 pharmaceutical companies against a South African law
that would grant the country greater access to generic medicines. Ge-
visser states that the "broad-based social movements that brought
apartheid to its knees in the 1980s ossified into bureaucracy or
withered into nonexistence." He writes that an example of the "conse-
quences" of such stagnation occurred in the early 1990s, when AIDS
activists helped draft a National AIDS Plan. Although the plan was
adopted by the African National Congress, it "was suffocated by red
tape" and never implemented because AIDS activists "found themselves
inside the system and thus bound by the inevitable constraints of
government," Gevisser writes. However, he states, TAC leader Zackie
Achmat's recent criticism of the South African government for failing
to provide pregnant women with nevirapine to reduce vertical trans-
mission "appeal[s] to the broad left wing of South African society
not only because of the government's manifest ineptitude in the face
of a horrifying pandemic ... but because the battle for treatment was
a perfect vehicle for taking on the heartlessness of global capital
and the perceived wrongheadedness of the ANC government's neoliberal
macroeconomic policy." Meanwhile, other left-wing groups such as the
labor federation COSATU rally around the drug access issue because
"it puts flesh on their critique of the government's quest for a bal-
anced budget in line with the World Bank's specifications, a quest
that means less funding for programs like the provision of lifesaving
medication," Gevisser states. He writes that despite the "battle
lines [being] drawn again" between activists and the South African
government, it "remains to be seen whether the victory against Big
Pharma is anything more than symbolic." Gevisser concludes, "Its sig-
nificance, rather, is in its creation of a mass-based, independent,
critically minded social movement that takes the best of South Af-
rica's tradition of struggle and engages it ... in a battle against
the negative consequences of the global economy and the manipulation
of institutions like the World Trade Organization by multinational
corporations. The TAC's battle could provide the same brand of moral
leadership in the global struggle that the antiapartheid movement did
in decades past" (Gevisser, Nation, 5/14).
--
Cecilia Snyder
mailto:csnyder@ccmc.org
--
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