By Alex Duval Smith
The "Aids drug victory" in the Pretoria High Court this week, when 39 major pharmaceutical companies withdrew their court action to stop South Africa from implementing a new law that would allow the import of cheap copies of patented drugs, represents a moral victory for the Third World.
However, economists on Thursday emphasised that African countries, home to 90 percent of the world's 36 million HIV carriers, would not be able to afford Aids drugs - patented ones or copies - without help from taxpayers in the northern hemisphere.
The Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association withdrew their court application on behalf of 39 companies to declare unconstitutional certain sections of the medicines acts.
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The main provisions at issue were those allowing for parallel importation and generic substitution of drugs, as well as the pricing committee for pharmaceuticals.
The companies claimed the implementation of the parallel importation clause in legislation would erode their patent rights, among other things.
The brutal reality, acknowledged by President Thabo Mbeki, is that African countries have neither the health infrastructure nor the cash to buy enough brand drugs or cheaper generic equivalents.
If there was a cure for Aids, the situation might be different, but drugs developed to date were only life-prolonging remedies for opportunistic infections.
In the face of this, Kenya and South Africa are attempting to develop vaccines - specific to Africa's HIV strains - and, earlier this month, Harvard development economist Jeffrey Sachs handed the Bush administration a blueprint of a plan to get Aids drugs into African hands.
Sachs, supported by 127 other Harvard economists, argued that a global trust fund must be established to combat the pandemic.
According to the blueprint, an Aids patient in Africa can be tested and treated with antiretroviral drugs, and monitored, for about $1 100 (about R8 140) a year.
Sachs's blueprint initially would target one million patients at a cost of $1,1-billion (about R8,9-billion) and seek to triple the target number by 2006.
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