This summit on generics is an unprecedented initiative of committed pro-treatment access People With AIDS groups, working in more than thirty countries, most of them from Africa. It will enable participants to study all perspectives of production and importation of generic drugs, or good quality copies, in order that action be undertaken as soon as possible. It is actually essential that legal clauses included in the WTO agreements could be used by southern countries for PWAs and to defend public health stakes. After four days of strategic brainstorming, local actors will invite international financial backers and political representatives to take concrete measures for this initiative to open a way to an effective availability of generics in southern countries. Summit Post-Poned With a view to ensuring that the Summit take place in the best technical and political conditions, the International Committee comprised of 15 NGOs from South and North partnering on this project, has called on its postponement.
New dates are to be set in the coming weeks.
Today, the growing mobilisation around the question of generic medicines and drug copies demands that work and involvement processes be rethought. Indeed, during the last year, it has mainly been on the battleground of patent protection in the South that the companies have exerted their efforts and resources. Yet thehistoric state of play can clearly be turned. In a twelvemonth's time these manufacturers have demonstrated that exorbitant drug prices are not a fatality, and that only competition can bring prices drown, especially so where the North industry is concerned. Thus, today, the utter urgency of treating the millions of people currently living with AIDS calls for affordable drug supply sources in the South to be multiplied and for South-South imports to be intensively developed.