Drug Patents Come Under Fire at AIDS Conference

Governments and community advocates should campaign to reform international drug patent rights, especially with respect to life-saving HIV/AIDS drugs, advocates said Wednesday at the ninth International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific in Bali, Indonesia.

"These are medicines that make for life and death," said Javed Jabbar, a former senator and minister from Pakistan. "In the context of HIV and AIDS, we need a new concept of people's property rights instead of intellectual property rights," said Jabbar, invoking a proposal put forward by economist Joseph Stiglitz.

Stiglitz suggests creating a fund that would pay fees to scientists for making discoveries that save lives. Any resulting medicines would be in the public domain. The proposal includes continuing to pay drug firms to produce critical drugs, Jabbar said.

Just 15 percent of the price of drugs goes to reimburse development costs, said Jabbar, echoing other activists at the meeting. Patent rights boost the price of drugs by an average of 400 percent, said Jabbar, citing academic studies. "They can make money but they don't have to make 400 percent profit," he said. "It's greed, it's shameful."

The rationale of a public domain framework for critical drugs is gaining momentum, Jabbar said. In July, GlaxoSmithKline granted a voluntary license for a South African company to produce generic abacavir, a second-line AIDS drug. Earlier in the year, Glaxo put drugs for neglected tropical diseases into a free patent pool, while explicitly excluding HIV/AIDS drugs from such a framework.

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