[Press Release] US Pressure on India Threatens Access to Medicines

South Africa 2011 © Jose Cendon A patient at Lizo Nobanda TB Care Center in Khayelitsha township takes her pills. NEW DELHI/NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 25, 2013—On the eve of a meeting between US president Barack Obama and Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh at the White House, the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) today warned that India faces retaliatory political pressure from the US government and pharmaceutical industry for its efforts to legally limit abusive patenting practices and to increase access to affordable generic medicines. Pharmaceutical companies are aggressively lobbying congress and the Obama administration in a broad campaign to press India into changing its intellectual property laws. India is a critical producer of affordable medicines, and competition among generic drug manufacturers there has brought down the price of medicines for HIV, TB, and cancer by more than 90 percent. Read a timeline of US and pharmaceutical industry pressure on India here “Every country has the right to take steps to increase access to medicines and implement a patent system in line with its public health needs,” said Leena Menghaney, manager of MSF’s Access Campaign in India. “Even though India is acting completely within its rights, the country must now deal with unrelenting, unwarranted, and deliberately misleading attacks from the multinational pharm...
Source: MSF News - Category: Global & Universal Source Type: news