Hiv And The European Pharmaceutical Companies Conflict

Audra Melton Philosophy 1110-Net 10- Ethics Aids in Africa and the European Pharmaceutical Companies Conflict Spring 2016 Professor John Santiago The Conflict: South Africa currently has the largest number of people in the world living with HIV/AIDS (avert.org, 2014). In the worldwide population, there are 37 million people with HIV and 25.8 million of those people live in Sub-Saharan Africa (AMFAR.org, 2015). This total is 70% of the total population diagnosed and 88% of the HIV population are children (amfAR.org, 2015). The Foundation for AIDS Research estimates that 1.4 million people were infected in 2014, and Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 66% of the AIDS mortality rate in 2014 (amfAR.org, 2015). Many political,†¦show more content†¦Developed countries with health care systems have taken advantage of current AIDS research (Shostak, 2002). The major pharmaceutical companies that manufactured the AIDS drugs campaigned against any means to offer these drugs at lower cost, claiming that governments and other sectors were responsible for finding reasonable means of providing the drugs; pharmaceutical companies were concerned prim arily with research and development (Gray, 2013). The pharmaceutical drug companies feared that drugs sold to Africa at a low cost might then be re-exported to wealthy countries for a profit, due to corruption in the government (Shostak, 2002). This ripple effect would then cause the more established countries to demand a lower cost (Shostak, 2002). This, in turn, could encourage AIDS patients in developed countries to demand lower prices as well (Shostak, 2002). The drug companies were also concerned with protecting their intellectual property rights (Shostak, 2002). In 1993, United States President Bill Clinton, urged to extend the patent laws to exist worldwide (Shostak, 2002). This developed into the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which protected the exclusive marketing rights of patent holders (Shostak, 2002). This agreement allowed pharmaceutical companies to ability to control the pricing and marketing of the drugs they developed