Look...Irony!
Canada Seeks to Block Reimport of Cheap AIDS Drugs
Thu November 6, 2003 01:57 PM ET
By Randall Palmer
OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada unveiled legislation on Thursday that would enable expensive AIDS drugs to be sold at low cost in Africa and Asia, and promised the pills would be marked to try to prevent illicit shipments back to Canada.
With the legislation, Canada becomes the first country to take concrete measures to implement a World Trade Organization agreement to provide cheap drugs to poor countries to treat AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other epidemics.
"This is a compassionate and effective Canadian response to a global challenge," Health Minister Anne McLellan told a news conference after the bill was introduced in Parliament.
Generic drug firms would be allowed to reach contracts with poor countries to supply the drugs, though the brand-name patent holders would have 30 days to decide whether they want to fill the contracts themselves, on the same terms.
One worry of the brand-name companies -- GlaxoSmithKline, for instance, which holds the patent for the anti-AIDS drug AZT -- is that the cut-price drugs could find their way on to a black market and back into North America.
But Trade Minister Pierre Pettigrew said the government would take steps to prevent that before allowing the plan to go ahead.
"We will assure that there is no diversion or reimporting of these drugs back into Canada," he said.
Dr. Robert Peterson, a senior official within the government's health department, said each pill would have some sort of marking identifying where it was destined.
"We will be able to track (it) back to the contract," he told Reuters.
Action could then be taken, seeking an end to the black marketeering and, if necessary, even cutting off the supply of the drug to a country.
If the generic companies end up supplying the drugs, they would pay the patent holder a 2 percent royalty. Their licenses would be valid for two years. |
