The high cost of AIDS

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by Patrick Lejtenyi

Although the recent Durban, South Africa, World Conference on Racism was by and large seen as a fiasco, some good may come of it yet. The world's pharmaceutical giants, under intense pressure from governments, NGOs and international lawyers, agreed to slash the prices of anti-AIDS drugs, allowing far easier access for the millions infected with the disease around the world. That victory, says Tom Waugh, organizer of the ninth annual Concordia HIV/AIDS Community Lecture Series, which begins next Thursday, represented "a provisionally happy ending to Durban. It compensated for some of the confusion and ambiguity [that surrounded the conference]."

Opening the series will be a presentation by Mark Heywood, head of the AIDS Law Project (ALP) at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. Heywood, described by Waugh as "a hotshot activist lawyer involved in the litigation against pharmaceutical companies in South Africa," has been involved with the ALP since 1994, long before AIDS was even considered a suitable topic of discussion, let alone activism. "There is an important political struggle around AIDS," says Waugh. "The pharmaceuticals yielded to the challenge and set a lot of precedents," including the slashing of anti-AIDS drugs in Brazil, which also threatened to manufacture generic drugs if costs remained prohibitively high.

Heywood will speak this weekend at the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network workshops, held at Hôtel de l'Institut, 3535 St-Denis, sixth floor, and on Thursday, Sept. 27 at Concordia's Hall Building in Room H-110, at 7 p.m. The event is free.