JOHANNESBURG, April 17 (AFP) - Activists pleaded for the survival of AIDS patients and drug companies for the future of their industry Tuesday on the eve of the resumption of a landmark court case over medicine prices.
The case in the Pretoria High Court pits 39 international pharmaceutical companies, asking the court to scrap South Africa's 1997 Medicines Act, against the government.
International medical organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF - Doctors Without Borders) presented the companies with a petition signed by 250,000 people calling on them to drop the case, which started on March 5 and resumes Wednesday.
MSF representative Eric Goemaere said signatories ranging from "4,000 inhabitants of slums of Nairobi to celebrities such as Whoopi Goldberg" wanted them to withdraw but that they "insist on their right to squeeze every last cent out of South Africans with HIV/AIDS."
"All over the world people are asking you to drop this. It is a nonsense," he told the South African Pharmaceutical Manufacturers' Assocication (PMA), which represents the companies.
The act would give the government wide powers to override patent rights and produce, license and import cheap versions of branded drugs, but the companies say this could put them out of business.
Goemaere decribed the case as "a benchmark for all poor countries who want to see the reality that one day all AIDS cases can be treated in poor countries like they can in rich countries."
Said Oxfam representative Kevin Watkins: "It will determine what comes first, the human rights of people or the commercial rights of companies."
But at a press conference the companies questioned the commitment of the South African government to treating the country's 4.7 million HIV carriers.
The PMA said government had for four years spurned companies' offers of cut-price AIDS medicines, instead dithering over the safety of the drugs and indeed over whether HIV caused AIDS.
"There is certainly a lack of willingness to negotiate," PMA chief executive Mirryena Deeb told a media briefing. "The industry will make drugs available at cost or less. "
Deeb said it was, for example, "baffling" that government had failed to take up an offer by Boehringer-Ingelheim to give it free Nevirapine for five years to reduce mother-to-child transmission of HIV.
The state says it cannot accept the offer because the drug is not yet registered for that purpose for fear that it may be unsafe.
"They talk about toxicity when the same drug is registered for use for adults," Deeb said. "Why then can they not give a pregnant women a small once-off dose and her baby a few drops of the drug?"
The companies, which include such giants as Boehringer-Ingelheim, Glaxo Wellcome and Merck and Roche, have submitted an affidavit to the court in which they say the government has failed to respond to offers of price reductions.
But MSF, Oxfam and the local AIDS lobby group Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) said the affidavit contained no justification for their pricing system and that the government was right to reject the offers.
"The offers made were not serious. Government was right not to accept them," Goemaere told journalists. "If I were director general of health I would not trust pharmaceutical companies."
He said the best offer by the companies of discounted brand-name anti-retroviral drugs came to 1,200 dollars a year compared to 350 dollars offered by manufacturers of generic versions.
The call for the companies to drop the case has been echoed by the European Parliament, the French government and the Non-Aligned Movement.
The activists, who are planning mass protests outside the Pretoria court on Wednesday, have their own problems with the government's AIDS policy.
TAC and the Congress of South African Trade Uions have slated the government's reluctance to provide anti-retrovrials on public health and have vowed to hold government's feet to the fire if it wins the case.
Said an MSF representative Tuesday: "Nothing would put more pressure on the South African government than to win."
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