AIDS Treatment News Statement for Africa Hearing
We did not attend the July 22 hearing of the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy & Human Resources, on "What is the United States Role in Combating the Global HIV/AIDS Epidemic?" but sent the following statement for the record:In Africa, over 20 million people have HIV and face almost certain death without treatment. All proven HIV treatments are patented, and all are priced far beyond the reach of the great majority of people with HIV. Intellectual-property and trade restrictions are far from the only obstacles to providing treatment, but they are often intractable obstacles, preventing potentially valuable projects from being successful, or even being considered.
For the United States to tell so many people around the world that it will continue to use its immense economic power to block them from any chance of saving their lives would be a disaster, in foreign policy as well as in health. There must be a better way.
Earlier this year Bristol-Myers Squibb announced a $100,000,000 program for research and for treatment of women in five African countries. We strongly encourage and commend such initiatives. But this program includes no price reform, and if it works as planned, it will deliver treatment to 20,000 people--about one person in a thousand in Africa who have HIV. Ultimately, charity-type programs can go only so far; we also need to develop rules (including trade and intellectual-property rules) that everyone can live with.
