Solidarity with the people living with HIV/AIDS (3)
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Near 200,000 persons have already signed the e-petition organised by
MSF [1] asking the 39 pharmaceutical companies to drop their lawsuit
against the South African government over a law that aims to make
lifesaving drugs more affordable and accessible.
In comparison to other online petitions, this number is surprisingly
high given especially that it was launched less than a month ago. Ac-
tive and popular communities such as Napster or Linux did not reach
such an overwhelming number of signatures. For example, despite a
large linux programmer community estimated to 152,474 users with cur-
rently 19,083 online projects [2], only 74,922 signed in 10 months an
e-petition opposing the introduction in Europe of patents on soft-
wares and algorithms [3], from which only 1,268 took part in a writ-
ten consultation to motivate their vote [4]. This relatively low num-
ber did however suffice to change the opinion of the French secretary
on trade responsible for patents, Christian Pierret, who chose to
side with the Linux community. With 200,000 signatures in support of
South Africa, it should be expected that Christian Pierret will cam-
paign on the side of Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF).
The wide support gained for the MSF e-petition may be explained in
part by the lack of public information on HIV/AIDS in the media. To
try to better understand this popular interest, I printed the resolu-
tion of the European Parliament on the "Access to medicines for AIDS
patients in the Third World" to distribute it on the streets in Ger-
many [5]. I was surprised to find out that all ages are very recep-
tive, churches of all confession asked to keep copies of the docu-
ment, members of other organisations such as Greenpeace were consid-
ering after reading it whether they should have a more active cam-
paigning role, and homeless persons selling "street journals" identi-
fied strongly with the issue of affordable access to medicines (some
are wearing a red ribbon) and enthusiastically offered to include a
copy into the monthly magazine they sell.
Christian Labadie, MS
mailto:CLabadie@t-online.de
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[1] <<Vous �tes d�j� plus de 200.000 � avoir sign� la p�tition>> source:
http://www.paris.msf.org/msf/Content/News.nsf/html/4UMP7W?OpenDocument
[2] SourceForge is a free service to support and archive Open Source
programming projects used mostly in Linux, source:
http://sourceforge.net/
[3] Petition organised by EuroLinux and directed to the European Par-
liament with the goal to warn European Authorities against the
dangers of software patents, source:
http://petition.eurolinux.org/
[4] As part of the European Union consultation on the e-patents,
source:
http://petition.eurolinux.org/consultation/sqlGetMail/1268/viewMail
[5] The European Parliament - http://www.europarl.eu.int - Minutes of
15/03/2001 - Provisional Edition B5-0182/2001: European Parlia-
ment resolution on access to drugs for HIV/AIDS victims in the
Third World. PDF version with illustrations, source:
http://nucwww.chem.sunysb.edu/prevges/sida.html
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