Protestors urge 'hands off medicine' at EU-India summit

Protestors wearing white medical coats staged a noisy protest outside an India-EU summit Friday to demand continued access to cheap medicine for hundreds of thousands of HIV sufferers in poor countries."I've seen too many people die! We need to have these medicines," said doctor Tido Von Schoen Angarer, of the international medical aid group Doctors Without Borders (MSF)."Hands off our medicine, the EU must listen," he said.The protest was staged as India and the 27-nation bloc continue long-stalled negotiations to strike a Free Trade Agreement, which the doctors fear could threaten India's ability to provide affordable generic medicines.The protestors say cheap generic drugs from India are vital to lives, particularly to the 33 million people living with HIV in developing countries.Generics from India have pushed prices down 99 percent, from 10,000 dollars a year per patient in 2000 to 70 dollars currently. MSF itself buys 80 percent of its AIDS drugs from India, and says it is currently keeping 160,000 people alive on the treatment."India is the pharmacy of the developing world," an MSF protestor said.India's government spokesman Vishnu Prakash told AFP that drugs produced in the country cost two percent of those produced by the world's pharmaceutical giants.India became a key supplier of affordable medicines because until 2005 it did not grant patents, enabling generic versions to be produced freely.Since 2005 however the World Trade Organisation's TRIPS agreement has forced India to patent drugs, though in a unique law the country calls for patents only in the case of drugs that show an improved therapeutic effect on existing medicines.Novartis took the Indian government to court over the patent law and lost the case in 2007 but has appealed.Groups such as MSF now fear that new provisions written into trade deals such as the FTA with the EU - due to be finalised in the next few months - will undermine future supplies of cheap generics.A particular concern is a provision called "data exclusivity", which would prevent generic manufacturers from relying on existing clinical trial data to register generic drugs for periods of up to 10 years.Generic producers would therefore have to carry out their own trials, automatically making drugs more expensive."We must show EU leaders that we don't want them to threaten India's ability to provide affordable medicine to millions," the protestors said in a leaflet."If the EU gets away with including provisions that hurt access to medicines in the EU-India FTA they will be more likely to push these measures in future agreements with other countries as well."

Source:AFP