A first-year law student brought a giant pharmaceutical to its knees. For Amy Kapczynski, the turning point came in Durban. When she arrived in the South African city for the World AIDS Conference last July, she was greeted by 5,000 demonstrators demanding access to medications that could prolong or save their lives. The people are incredibly politically literate, active and motivated. The activists' slogan, with its appeal to justice and rejection of pity, fired Kapczynski's imagination.
People have a right to medication.
They have a right to dignity and to have their own lives and the highest attainable standard of health. Print story E-mail story Kapczynski attended a shadow conference for women that brought together participants from the United States, Europe and South Africa. It was at those meetings, Kapczynski says, that she was viscerally jolted into an awareness of the gulf that separates the reality of AIDS in the industrialized world from that in impoverished countries like South Africa, where the vast majority of people live in abject poverty. As the panel discussed the side effects of taking dozens of anti-retroviral drugs each day, it suddenly dawned on her that many of the women listening to the discussion didn't have access to any drugs whatsoever. HIV-positive participants from Germany and the United States might suffer nausea and fatigue, but most of them were going to live for years or decades.