LOS ANGELES, March 24 /PRNewswire/ -- AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the largest AIDS organization in the US which operates free AIDS treatment clinics in the US, Africa, Central America and Asia -- including one clinic in Mysore, India -- today decried the passage of a bill by India’s upper house of parliament that would change the country’s patent laws to prohibit the domestic production of low-cost, generic versions of patented drugs, including antiretroviral AIDS drugs. The lower house of parliament passed the bill on Tuesday and it quickly moved it on to the upper chamber.
“We believe the passage of this legislation today to bring India in to compliance with the World Trade Organization’s intellectual property agreement will profoundly diminish the availability of, and access to, high-quality, inexpensive generic AIDS drugs, particularly in Africa and the rest of the developing world,” said Michael Weinstein, President of AIDS Healthcare Foundation. “At a time of exploding need for treatment around the globe, we should be doing everything we can to increase the availability of such life-saving medicines, not be protecting patent rights of multi-national drug giants. We must all work together to ensure that high-quality, inexpensive generic anti-retroviral drugs remain available -- and in fact become more widely available -- to those millions in need worldwide.”
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Daily HIV/AIDS Report, “India,...the third-largest producer and a major exporter of generic drugs, previously did not recognize international patents, allowing the country to produce generic versions of medications patented in other countries as long as they use a different manufacturing process.”
AIDS Healthcare Foundation
CONTACT: Ged Kenslea, Communications Director of AIDS HealthcareFoundation, +1-323-860-5225, or mobile, +1-323-791-5526, gedk@aidshealth.org