We urge other academics, in South Africa and globally, to support the Treatment Action Campaign and its vital work with both your financial and intellectual assets. The TAC is the heart of the international AIDS movement – we cannot sit by and let that heartbeat still.

India’s new Prime Minister, Narendra Modi and his delegation, who have been visiting the U.S. for the first time, have spent considerable time and energy in courting U.S. business interests. On Monday, September 29, the Indian PM met with 17 chief executives of major U.S. companies in joint and individual meetings¹ and on September 30 he met with the U.S.-India Business Council comprising over 300 top U.S. companies.²  Prime Minister Modi is promising to open India to more direct foreign investment and to further liberalize the Indian economy to make it easier for multinational corporations to operate there. To the dismay of health activists worldwide, the US administration appears to have successfully used the Indian PM’s visit to maneuver the Indian government into committing to a joint mechanism on intellectual property. The benign sounding “High Level Intellectual Property (IP) Working Group” is designed to pressure India into changing its interpretation and application of health safeguards in India’s intellectual property policy, ultimately undermining India’s role as the pharmacy for the poor.

Médecins Sans Frontières has obtained an important but long-delayed victory in a a challenge to the refusal of the Medicines Control Council in South Africa to issue section 21 permission allowing the temporary importation and patient use of a generic version of a key, tuberculosis medicine, linezolid. Linezolid can be effectively used as a treatment of drug-resistant tuberculosis, but the private sector cost of taking one pill a day for two years was approximately $49,000 when the medicine was sourced from the brand-name patent holder, Pfizer, at $65/pill. Generic versions of linezolid are manufactured in India by Hetero at significantly reduced cost of only $8/pill.

Inside US Trade[1] and the USTR[2] have announced that the U.S. is floating new proposals on IP in its marathon Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement negotiations. Although the U.S. touts its new proposals as being balanced, as prioritizing access to medicines, and as recognizing the interests of developing country negotiating partners, particularly, Peru, Vietnam, Mexico, and Malaysia, its actual proposals offer modest temporary respite at best from only a small fraction of U.S. demands. 

In recent months, two countries with large economies and large populations both took steps to rework their patent laws, in part, to expand access to medicines. The moves come amid increasing concerns that treatments for certain ailments, such as AIDS and cancer, are out of reach for many people. Their actions also underscore growing tension with the pharmaceutical industry over pricing policies and an increasing willingness among some governments to rely on international trade agreements to consider compulsory licenses as a work-around solution. Brook Baker, a professor in the Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy at the Northeastern University School of Law, and a member of Health Gap, Global Access Project, suggests other countries may be emboldened to do the same.

India’s patent laws balance producer and consumer interest. Big Pharma would like that to change, to beat back generic competition.

On June 18, 2013, 170 Members of Congress wrote to President Obama complaining about Indian trade policy and more particularly India's intellectual property "climate." Under the umbrella of claiming that policies of the Government of India favor domestic producers over U.S. Exporters – in other words, that India is protectionist – the Members of Congress claimed that "the intellectual property (IP) climate has become increasingly challenging in India."

Novartis, its fellow Big Pharma multinationals, Chambers of Commerce, and PhRMA have all roundly denounced India's Supreme Court's decision invalidating Novartis' patent application for Glivec (Gleevec in the United States) and its affirmation of strict anti-evergreening standards of patentability and inventive step in India.  As usual, Big Pharma cannot tell the truth about what India has done, what international intellectual property rules require, and what the impact of this decision will be on product introductions in India and innovation of new medicines.  Because journalists continue to carry Pharma canards and since observers are anxious to understand whether India's decision is legal or purely instrumental to advance industrial policy in favor of Indian generics, I debunk the major myths with what I hope are convincing facts.

In a stunning development, following an obscure vote of Heads of State at the Africa Union in 2007 (Assembly Council/AU/Dec. 138(VIII)), the AU Scientific, Technical, and Research Commission has proposed a draft statute to establish the Pan-Africa Intellectual Property Organization (PAIPO).  This proposed legislation will be presented to a meeting of the African Ministers in charge of Science and Technology on 6-12 November 2012 in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Introduction