Last term the Student Stop AIDS Campaign launched a campaign to get Abbott Laboratories and Gilead Sciences to make their new drugs Kaletra and Viread (Tenofovir) available in low and middle income countries. We held a mass letter writing campaign and sent the companies over 3500 letters demanding that they make these vitally important ARVs available to people who need them.

After much effort and some trickery on Abbott’s part, (trying to throw us off by claiming they’d made Kaletra available, but referring to the old Kaletra rather than the new one- so sneaky!) we seem to have made a breakthrough. In August this year new Kaletra finally arrived in MSF’s treatment programs in Nigeria! Abbott have also published differential prices for the drug in low and middle income countries and started the process of registering new Kaletra in South Africa.

At the International AIDS Conference in Toronto this year Fionnuala Murphy, formerly the Stop AIDS Societies Campaign Coordinator, had the privilege of meeting Ibrahim Umoru, from Nigeria. Ibrahim had been interviewed for our campaign last term because he was in desperate need of new Kaletra, but was unable to access it. When Fionnuala introduced herself and told him she was part of the Student Stop AIDS Campaign he threw his arms around her, thanking her and all the students for the campaign. New Kaletra is available in Nigeria because we, MSF and the Student Global AIDS Campaign lobbied for it!

This is a huge leap forward, but it’s still not enough. The differential prices published are still too high in most Middle-income countries and fundamentally, we cannot fight this pandemic on a drug-by-drug basis! We need systemic change so we’re no longer at the mercy of the good will of pharmaceutical companies. This year’s campaign is targeting our government, because at base that is where the change must come from.

Happy campaigning!

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 8th, 2006 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Campaign News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.