India’s compliance with intellectual property rights (WTO) may spell doom for AID’s victims worldwide

Source: India’s Choice by NYTimes

For an AIDS patient in a poor country lucky enough to get antiretroviral treatment, chances are that the pills that stave off death come from India. Generic knockoffs of AIDS drugs made by Indian manufacturers - now treating patients in 200 countries - have brought the price of antiretroviral therapy down to $140 a year from $12,000.

That luck may soon run out. India has become the world’s supplier of cheap AIDS drugs because it has the necessary raw materials and a thriving and sophisticated copycat drug industry made possible by laws that grant patents to the process of making medicines, rather than to the drugs themselves. But when India signed the World Trade Organization’s agreement on intellectual property in 1994, it was required to institute patents on products by Jan. 1, 2005. These rules have little to do with free trade and more to do with the lobbying power of the American and European pharmaceutical industries.

India’s government has issued rules that will effectively end the copycat industry for newer drugs. For the world’s poor, this will be a double hit - cutting off the supply of affordable medicines and removing the generic competition that drives down the cost of brand-name drugs.

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