SACC HAILS ABANDONMENT OF DRUG SUIT AS A "VICTORY FOR THE DEVELOPING WORLD"

The Rev. Dr. Donald Cragg, the Acting General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, today welcomed the decision of the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers' Association of South Africa (PMA) and 39 drug companies to abandon a lawsuit that could have prevented the South African government from making essential drugs available at more affordable rates.

"The PMA's court battle may have been very costly for its members, but it was South Africans living with HIV who were really paying the price," said Cragg. Recent estimates suggest that AIDS is killing roughly 5,000 people per week across the country, with women being most vulnerable to infection.

"This is really a major victory, not just for South Africans, but for the developing world," observed the Rev. Malcolm Damon, Co-ordinator of the SACC's Public Policy Liaison Office. "The Treatment Action Campaign, Médecins Sans Frontières, Oxfam and other organisations have done a magnificent job of highlighting the issues and mobilising popular response."

The SACC urged the pharmaceutical giants to continue to work with the government to expedite delivery of life-saving drugs to poor communities, including medications to treat AIDS-related illnesses.

According to Damon, churches accept that, in normal circumstances, patent rights enable pharmaceutical manufacturers to recover money invested in drug development. "However, the AIDS epidemic is not 'normal'. It is an emergency that threatens the survival of much of the developing world," he warned.

The Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement administered by the World Trade Organisation is usually cited as the obstacle to parallel importing and compulsory licensing--two strategies that the South African government wants to use to make cheaper medications available to treat HIV and other diseases. However, the TRIPS agreement permits the use of such measures.

Furthermore, private companies did not finance the research that produced many of the key drugs used in mitigating the effects of HIV. They were developed with public (usually US government) funds, and private sector firms later secured exclusive marketing rights. "In these cases, intellectual property rights are not even an issue," Damon said.

"We appreciate drug companies' offers to make essential drugs available to the developing world at reduced rates, but big business should not have ultimate control over access to these medications. The law must uphold government's duty to put people before profits," Damon added.

Damon also noted that the fact that developing nations cannot afford medicines that are routinely prescribed in the industrial world is a further example of the enormous gap in living standards which can only be addressed by a concerted global campaign for economic justice.

The two- and three-drug combinations typically administered in the industrialised world to suppress the replication of the HIV virus can cost as much as R100 000 per year, but generic equivalents of many of these drugs are available in countries such as India, Brazil and Thailand for a fraction of the price. In 1997, the South African government amended the Medicines and Related Substances Act to permit importation of more affordable anti-AIDS drugs. Thirty-nine domestic and international drug companies, led by the PMA, had filed suit to block implementation of the amendments.