AIDS Drug Fight Moves to Kenya's Parliament

Members of Kenya's parliament introduced a bill today that would allow the suspension of patents in order to gain access to generic drugs. Key members of parliament received a petition Thursday signed by 50,000 Kenyans in support of the bill. Those signatures were collected in five days by the Kenyan Coalition for Access to Essential Medicines. A vote on the bill is expected on Tuesday. "We are going to use all of our power to get this bill passed as it is written," said Oweno Achola, the chairman of the parliamentary committee on education, science and technology. "This bill affects everybody, not just AIDS patients. It is for everyone who needs essential drugs."

AIDS activists and pharmaceutical companies have been lobbying hard to shape the Industrial Properties Bill because of clauses that would allow the government to declare AIDS a national health emergency, suspend the patents on essential drugs, and allow the manufacture and importation of generic drugs. Kenya is only the second African nation to move to change its laws to comply with World Trade Organization rules, which spell out when intellectual property rights, such as patents, can be suspended in the public interest. Kenya could set an example for other African nations, which are also required to adopt the rules by 2006.

AIDS activists say that by adopting the rules and suspending patents, African governments can make modern AIDS drugs affordable to the continent's poor by increasing competition between the big drug companies and smaller generic manufacturers. Pharmaceutical companies have lobbied for provisions that would ensure that they have the chance to match the prices offered by generic manufacturers before they lost their patent protection. AIDS activists worry that this could slow the delivery of the drugs to AIDS patients, who are dying, they say, at the rate of 700 a day.

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