Mbeki vs. the AIDS Establishment... (13)
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Right to say no
An editorial in The Citizen newspaper, Johannesburg, Monday, 24 July:
The South African government is quite correct to decline the offer of a
R1b-billion loan from the US Import Export Bank to buy drugs to combat
HIV/Aids. Borrowing money is not a solution to this problem, especially
when one of the conditions is that drugs must be bought from US firms.
Any such anti-Aids programme must be sustainable in the long term. This
means the drugs must be affordable and without strings attached. For
this to happen South Africa must be allowed to develop its own generic
substitutes or to import parallel products at low prices, without
threats of litigation or other sanction. We hope the government is ac-
tively pursuing these options.
[Patrick Bond <mailto:pbond@wn.apc.org> notes on Pharm-policy: The
Citizen is a notoriously right-wing paper; this is quite a breakthrough
in mainstream consciousness, if taken at face value.]
Survey re. patents on AIDS drugs:
http://www.egroups.com/surveys/prevges
--
Christian Labadie
mailto:CLabadie@t-online.de
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