South African AIDS Group Lodges Complaint Against Major Drug Companies for Overpricing

The South African AIDS activist group Treatment Action Campaign and COSATSU, the nation's largest labor federation, filed a complaint with South Africa's Competition Commission Thursday in an attempt to force two pharmaceutical companies to drop the price of their AIDS drugs. The companies, GlaxoSmithKline and Boehringer Ingelheim, already have drastically reduced the price of their AIDS medicines in the developing world under intense international pressure. But according to TAG, the price of full AIDS treatment -- about $117 a month -- is still too high for most people in the country.

The groups asked the commission, which seeks to ensure that dominant companies do not abuse their power, to fine the drug companies and order them to change their pricing practices. TAG Secretary Mark Heywood called on all drug companies to waive their patent rights in South Africa so cheaper, generic versions of the medicines could be produced. That would lower the cost of treatment to $28 dollars a month, he said.

Both drug companies said the formal complaint was baseless. "Our pricing in South Africa is one of the lowest in the world," said Vicki Ehrich, an executive for GlaxoSmithKline in South Africa. Glaxo holds the patents on AZT, 3TC and Combivir. Kevin McKenna, technical director of Boehringer Ingelheim in South Africa, said the local price of its AIDS drug nevirapine was one-fifth its price in Europe or the United States.

Ehrich said she was disappointed Glaxo was being targeted, especially since it had offered to sell the drugs at cost to South Africa. The government has yet to take up that offer. South Africa could ignore drug company patents during a national emergency, but the government has yet to declare HIV, which infects 11 percent of the country's 43 million people, an emergency. Pharmaceutical companies last year filed, and eventually dropped, a suit to block the government from importing or manufacturing generic drugs. The government, however, has declined to take any steps to import generic medicines.

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