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The Guardian April 25, 2001 Chris McGreal South Africa's humiliation of the world's biggest drug companies, forced to abandon a lawsuit that critics said was aimed at protecting profits at the expense of lives, has prompted Kenya to say it too will pass laws to permit the importation of cheaper medicines. The east African nation's health minister, professor Sam Ongeri, said Kenya has drafted a bill to allow the government to buy anti-Aids drugs because patented medicines are protected by "unrealistic" property rights laws and are too expensive. Kenya's decision is a direct result of the collapse of the legal attempt by 39 drug companies in the Pretoria high court to overturn a law permitting the South African government to bypass patents when there is deemed to be a health emergency or where drugs are declared "unaffordable". Prof Ongeri said 700 Kenyans die of Aids each day, and that 2.2m people in his country are infected with HIV. Half of Kenya's hospital beds are occupied by Aids patients. But South Africa's legal victory has also had a wider if less immediately visible impact. It is forcing governments and the drug companies to discuss how they now confront a virus that infects 25m people in sub-Saharan Africa. Most countries cannot afford even the knocked-down prices of generic drugs, and the major pharmaceutical companies still stand to make large profits even selling their wares at a fraction of the price they now demand. Six of the largest pharmaceutical multinationals have already slashed prices, in part to repair some of the damage done to the image of the industry by the South African court case. But anti-retroviral drugs remain beyond the reach of governments that would have to buy millions of pills each day to treat all those infected with HIV. African leaders and the drug industry are agreed on one thing - the need for massive funding of a drug supply programme by the west. International health experts have told the United Nations that an international fund of more than £6.9bn a year is required to combat not only Aids but other serious diseases, such as tuberculosis and malaria, which have helped lower the average life expectancy in Africa to just 48 years. A Harvard university economist, Jeffrey Sachs, said some diseases have reached epidemic proportions and threaten to set back development in Africa by decades. "It's not just Aids, it's everything in health in Africa that has been allowed to get out of control," he said. "We do not have the means at this stage to solve the problem fully having let it get so utterly out of control." African leaders are meeting in Nigeria this week to discuss the Aids crisis. The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, plans to take advantage of the publicity generated by the court case in South Africa to give a greater international political profile to the pandemic and "shift this whole international campaign, which is starting to take shape, into high gear". He argues that a key factor is to rebuild Africa's dilapidated health care systems, and recommends a move toward prevention over treatment. Nigeria's vice-president, Atiku Abubakar, said the summit "was the first time that African leaders are coming together with other interested parties to discuss how to arrest the latest epidemic". "The dual epidemic of HIV/Aids and tuberculosis is devastating the continent," he said. story url
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