Kenya AIDS activists criticize drug firms

AIDS activists said on Thursday they feared the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies might be trying to hijack a parliamentary bill that would allow Kenya to import and manufacture cheap medicines.

In the past week senior officials from the main drug firms said they had intensely lobbied those involved with the bill, likely to be debated early next month.

Activists said the industry had behaved unethically in a bid to emasculate the bill, denying Kenyans with HIV-AIDS access to drugs that have helped reduce AIDS deaths in the West.

"We know that they can use measures that are very subtle which may be used in manners which are not very transparent," Chris Ouma of Action Aid told a news conference.

Ouma especially condemned a plan to take parliamentary members and committees drafting the bill on a paid trip to a coastal resort this weekend. The speaker of parliament has since vetoed the trip.

"It can only raise questions about the motive and ethics of the whole issue," Ouma said.

The bill would make it easier for the Kenyan government to import and manufacture generic versions of patented medicines, especially antiretroviral AIDS drugs. It would also cut the cost of drugs for other epidemics like malaria and typhoid.

Although 2.2 million Kenyans are HIV positive, fewer than 2,000 receive anti-retroviral treatment, which has helped reduce AIDS deaths in the West by 75 percent.

Snowball effect

Last month, the drugs industry was badly bruised in South Africa when it abandoned a court case seeking to challenge a similar law. Analysts said the pharmaceutical companies were desperate not to let the same happen in Kenya for fear of creating a snowball effect across the rest of the world’s poorest continent, where 25.3 million people live with HIV-AIDS.

"It seems to us that it’s quite unlikely they would...do something in court any more because it was just such a disaster for them on a public relations level," said Samantha Bolton, a spokeswoman for aid charity Medecins sans Frontieres. "It’s quite likely that they will go behind the scenes and function in a different way. That’s why we would like this to be as transparent as possible."

Pharmaceutical company officials said the intense lobbying was because they had been left out of the drafting of the bill. "Yes, there are things we want to remove from the bill that are totally unfair," an official at a leading drugs firm said. "MPs have only heard one side of the story and have been hoodwinked by emotion into creating an unbalanced bill." The industry has defended the high cost of its antiretroviral drug cocktails — which can sometimes cost over $4,000 a year — saying the income generated from its patents is vital to funding research programmes.

The pharmaceutical firms at the end of April slashed some of their prices, a move critics said did not go far enough. The treatment still remains well beyond the scope of most Kenyans, over half of whom earn under $1 a day.

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