Six-month-old WTO accord on AIDS drugs still having little pratical impact

PARIS (AFP) Mar 07, 2004
A deal struck six months ago to change WTO rules on intellectual property rights to enable poor countries to import generic prescription drugs they cannot manufacture has yet to make any real impact in Africa, home to most of the world's AIDS sufferers.

What little progress has been made has been achieved thanks to non-governmental organizations rather than to the World Trade Organisation, officials and doctors say.

According to Lee Jong-Wook, WTO director-general, "the situation is catastrophic," since only 50,000 of the four million AIDS sufferers in sub-Saharan Africa can afford antiretroviral drugs.

And that is only part of the picture. While attention has been focused on drugs to prolong the lives of people with AIDS, other deadly diseases are ignored.

Africa's 700 million people account for only one tenth of the world population, but the continent suffered more than half the 11 million deaths due to infectious diseases last year, the World Health Organization said.

Gabon's health minister, Faustin Boukoubi, said "at our level we have not yet seen anything."

In South Africa, where eight percent of the population was infected with HIV last year, the government official in charge of medicines, Humphrey Zokufa, said he was not even aware of the WTO agreement.

But in Rwanda, the secretary of the national committee for combatting AIDS, Agnes Binagwaho, said the number of people receiving antiretroviral treatment had tripled from 800 to 2,500 in two months, thanks to the efforts of the Clinton Foundation.

The foundation hopes to make drugs available to two million AIDS sufferers in Africa and the Caribbean by 2008.

In Chad, the director of the state drug-procurement office, Hassan Salim, said that the price of antiretrovirals had come down sharply thanks to Access, a programme set up jointly by six large international pharmaceutical companies, UNAIDS, the WTO and UNICEF.

According to the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, Access today reaches 80,000 patients, three times as many as in 2000, when it began work.

In Kenya, Krista Cepuch of Doctors Without Borders (known by its French initials MSF) said the government was now distributing antiretrovirals to 10,000 people, although this is far short of the two and a half million infected with HIV in that country.

The MSF representative in Ivory Coast, Peter Orr, warned moreover that in the struggle to fight AIDS, "obscure" but equally deadly diseases such as malaria and sleeping sickness were being ignored because "they are not an attractive market" for drug companies in the rich countres.

TERRA.WIRE