The withdrawal by the South African Pharmaceutical Manufacturers' Association and 39 international pharmaceutical companies of their action against the South African Government to stop the importation or manufacture of cheaper generic anti-AIDS drugs represents an important moral victory in global terms. It remains to be seen, however, whether cheaper drugs effective against AIDS will actually become available to any of the more than 25 million sub-Saharan Africans known to be living with the lethal disease. After the drug companies withdrew their case, the South African Minister for Health, Ms Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, said that her country could still not afford to distribute even the cheaper generic drugs to the 4.7 million citizens of that State living with HIV infection now. The other, poorer, sub-Saharan states in Africa certainly could not afford the cheaper drugs either.
Brazil has been manufacturing effective generic drugs, copied from the vastly more expensive patented products manufactured by the companies who had taken the action against the South African Government, for some years past. Brazil has managed to halve its national death rate from AIDS with these drugs. But the international pharmaceutical industry is also taking a case against Brazil before the World Trade Organisation in Geneva, claiming that its lifesaving drugs are in breach of the WTO's trading rules which (so it is claimed) do allow for intellectual property rights, such as patents, to be over-ridden in "exceptional circumstances". Perhaps the same companies that were involved in the case against South Africa and its attendant public relations embarrassments for those companies, will re-think their strategies before hauling Brazil up in front of the WTO court.
The South African Government has been, to say the least, ambivalent about its approach to treating patients with AIDS. It cancelled a limited programme in which South African hospitals were providing certain drugs to pregnant mothers with HIV infection to prevent their passing on of the virus to their children. It may not now capitalise on the moral victory it has won in court to achieve adequate therapy for its 4.7 million HIV-positive citizens. It may not even go on to learn from other sub-Saharan nations like Uganda where a demonstrably beneficial effect has been achieved through appropriate preventive and educational programmes.
But the world cannot, and must not, ignore the moral victory that has been achieved in Pretoria. The tens of millions of people who will die of AIDS in developing countries cannot be left to their predictable fate. The moral imperative to provide them with effective life-prolonging treatments must over-ride the merely legal provisions to protect patents around the world. And the very wealthy international pharmaceutical industry cannot pretend that its handsome global profits are made from developing countries where patented products cannot be afforded even to save literally tens of millions of lives.