Mitra Ebadolahi Ebadolahi is a
third-year international development studies and history student
who believes in people over profits and challenges everyone to get
up and do something about these atrocities. For more information,
or to join the movement, e-mail [email protected].
Click Here for more articles by Mitra Ebadolahi
In South Africa, there lives a boy named Nkosi Johnson. He is 11
years old, weighs 27 pounds, and is dying of AIDS. Three weeks ago,
after a life-long struggle with the disease, he suffered from brain
damage as his body tried desperately to fight back. As a result,
his voice was silenced.
Currently, 36 million people throughout the world are infected
with HIV, the virus which causes AIDS. Of these, 25 million are
living in Sub-Saharan Africa. At current rates, the number of
Africans dead because of AIDS within the next decade will surpass
the entire population of France.
For years, researchers have been working to develop drugs to
prevent, alleviate, or cure AIDS and related illnesses such as
tuberculosis and Kaposi’s sarcoma (a specific type of cancer
which affects people with full-blown AIDS). Many drugs, especially
anti-retroviral drugs such as AZT, have been shown to be effective
in curbing opportunistic infections, lowering levels of the virus
in infected individuals and, in some cases, diminishing
transmission of the disease between a pregnant mother and her
unborn child.
This should be great news, right? In a perfect world, yes. But
although there are drugs which can dramatically impact the struggle
against the AIDS epidemic, there are also two formidable obstacles
standing between patients like Nkosi and the treatment they so
desperately need: drug companies and their precious profits.
In a three-part series in The Washington Post, Dec. 27-29,
investigative journalists Barton Gellman and Bill Brubaker exposed
this ultimate manifestation of corporate greed over human needs. As
Gellman explains, “Corporate boards … weighed the costs and
benefits of pricing AIDS medicines within reach of most of the
dying, (and) with the tacit and sometimes explicit assent of public
authorities, decided the costs were too great.”
Similarly, the World Bank has deemed these critical medications
to be “cost-ineffective in the Third World, and (has
discouraged indebted developing nations) from buying
them.”
 Illustration by HINGYI KHONG/Daily Bruin
No, that’s not a typo. According to today’s global
economic system, people living in developing countries are unable
to obtain life-saving medicines because they are guilty of the
greatest crime: absolute poverty.
In many developing countries, health budgets average five
dollars per person per year. In the United States, one year of AIDS
therapy costs around $15,000. Last year, during the 13th
International AIDS Conference, researchers declared that the global
cost of treating AIDS patients at current market prices would be at
least $60 billion annually.
In Zimbabwe, the cost of providing the population with
anti-retroviral drugs could be as high as $18 billion annually,
which amounts to 265 percent of the country’s gross national
product. On the other side of the planet, in the United States, the
Pentagon spends $240 billion on defense spending alone.
That’s four times more money than we would need each year to
combat this deadly epidemic.
These figures indicate an alarming reality: drug companies and
international governing bodies such as the World Bank and the World
Health Organization have set a price on human lives and developed
their policies with profit margins, rather than human beings in
mind. If an AIDS patient is “unprofitable,” then he or
she is doomed to suffering and an early grave.
Of course, the pharmaceutical industry has long denied any
wrong-doing, downplaying its role in corporate genocide by claiming
that the true obstacles to AIDS treatment in the developing world
are social and managerial barriers, as well as undeveloped health
care systems. According to this argument, “price has no
relationship to the problem of access (to medication) because so
many other barriers exist in Africa’s social, political and
medical systems.”
But critics in watchdog organizations such as Ralph
Nader’s Consumer Project on Technology (www.cptech.org) and
the international Doctors Without Borders
(www.doctorswithoutborders.org) have argued that such excuses are
meant only to obscure the industry’s murderous quest for
profits.
To make matters worse, critics point out that these
multi-billion dollar enterprises do not need to “protect
their profits,” as they can afford to give these life-saving
medicines to poor countries for virtually nothing.
Yet, as WHO analyst Michael Scholtz explains, “If cheaper
drugs in Africa put downward pressure on the global price, then the
core markets of the pharmaceutical industry are at risk.”
In other words, drug companies fear that cheap drugs will be
resold to patients in rich countries by “entrepreneurs”
in poor countries, who could thus steal away the pharmaceutical
industry’s monopoly on medicine profits. Another problem is
the fact that such discounts could “draw attention to the
high profit margins (of the pharmaceutical industry) in developed
countries.”
Drug patents are protected internationally by the Trade-Related
Intellectual Property Rights agreement, which must be adopted by
any government seeking to participate in the World Trade
Organization. TRIPS, however, authorizes two alternatives to
expensive medicines for poor countries in dire straits: compulsory
licensing and parallel importation.
In 1997, the South African government passed a piece of
legislation which invoked compulsory licensing and parallel
importation as a last-ditch effort to curb the AIDS epidemic among
its citizens. As L.J. Davis explains in Mother Jones, “under
compulsory licensing, South Africa could compel a drug company to
authorize local manufacturers to produce generic versions of
drugs.” This process can decrease the cost of certain
medications by as much as 90 percent.
Similarly, parallel importation would allow South Africans to
import emergency medicines from other countries where these
treatments may be available for less. In return for these
privileges, the South African Ministry of Health vowed to abide by
TRIPS and pay modest royalties to patent holders and their
marketing agencies.
Nevertheless, the pharmaceutical industry reacted immediately.
More than 40 drug companies filed a joint suit in South
Africa’s Constitutional Court, barring the amendment from
taking effect because it “infringed on their rights.”
To date, South Africa is victimized by this informal blockade,
utterly unable to purchase life-saving medicines.
The actions of these pharmaceutical corporations sets an
international example of murder in the first degree. The industry
has blatantly violated universally-accepted human rights, including
the right to benefit from scientific advancements and live with
dignity.
Yet there is an alternative. Cipla, India’s largest
domestic drug company, offers a remarkable example. Throughout the
past year, the pharmaceutical giant has been manufacturing generic
versions of AIDS medications and offering them to patients in India
at a 150 percent discount. Though it has been attacked by other
drug corporations, Cipla has repeatedly reiterated its commitment
to providing suffering people with medical treatment.
It is time for all of us, as human beings, to recognize the
reality of AIDS, and the deadly cost of allowing corporations to
control human access to health care and treatment. How can we
justify forcing people to pay for their illnesses? Treatments, and
health care, must be free, and universally so. This is no radical
hypothesis. It is the only way we can hope to survive.
For those who insist on looking at these issues from a purely
“cost-benefit” analysis, I invite you to use your
profits to travel to South Africa, and to ponder this statistic:
with $40 billion a year, we can achieve and maintain basic
universal health care and reproductive health care for all.
That’s less than 4 percent of the combined wealth of the 225
richest people in the world.
We must act now. As researcher Sally Heymann pointed out ten
years ago, “The opportunity cost of waiting will be paid for
in human lives.”