[Ip-health] Africa Bloc Applies to WTO for License to Produce Cheap AIDS Drugs

[James Love]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [news] Africa Bloc Applies to WTO for License to Produce Cheap AIDS
Drugs
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 13:48:49 -0500 (EST)
From: Richard Jefferys <richard.jefferys@verizon.net>
Reply-To: healthgap@CritPath.Org
To: Multiple recipients of list <healthgap@CritPath.Org>

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/444656

Africa Bloc Applies to WTO for License to Produce Cheap AIDS Drugs

LUSAKA, Zambia (Reuters) Nov 15 - Africa's major free trade bloc has
applied to the World Trade Organisation for the right to manufacture
cheap antiretroviral drugs, saying that HIV/AIDS was the biggest threat
to regional economic development, the group's secretary general said
Friday.

"We have applied for licensing from the WTO to allow us to manufacture
AIDS drugs, and we would like to see this happening by December,"
Erastus Mwencha, secretary general of the Common Market for Eastern and
Southern Africa (COMESA), told Reuters.

"We want the WTO to treat COMESA as one region so that drugs
manufactured in one country can be sold in all member states without
problems," Mwencha said.

COMESA's request came as two dozen world trade ministers, meeting in
Sydney, discussed putting a broad plan before the WTO that would allow
poor countries to manufacture generic copies of drugs that are protected
by intellectual property rights in developed countries.

Mwencha said COMESA, made up of 20 countries from Egypt to Madagascar,
has determined that AIDS was strangling trade and development across
Africa because the epidemic is killing the continent's most qualified
and economically active people.

He said COMESA had applied for a domestic manufacturing licensing system
that would allow one country making antiretroviral drugs to export to
other COMESA members--avoiding what he described as overpriced licensing
deals demanded by current antiretroviral drug manufacturers.

"The West argue that they must make profits, but our argument is that
drugs must be cheaper as we cannot continue to see people dying for the
sake of profits," Mwencha said.

Analysts and AIDS activists have charged the United States and the
international pharmaceutical industry with using the WTO agreement on
Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) to attack
developing countries that are trying to develop their own antiretroviral
drugs.

Analysts say TRIPS has worsened health problems for most developing
countries by raising drug prices and reducing access for poor people.




Richard Jefferys
Basic Science Project Director
Treatment Action Group
611 Broadway, Suite 612
New York, NY 10012
Tel: (212) 253-7922
Fax: (212) 253-7923
E-mail: richard.jefferys@verizon.net




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James Love, Consumer Project on Technology
http://www.cptech.org, mailto:love@cptech.org
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