AIDS crisis

Piracy is a crime against humanity. Pirates steal and destroy wantonly. They rape and kill with abandon. Piracy is an inappropriate term for providing essential medicines to the world s poorest people. Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) broke the law when it began offering anti-retroviral therapy (ART) in Khayelitsha Township in South Africa in 2001. The crime against humanity would have been a studied failure to act in the face of the AIDS crisis. 

The demand in the market that had hitherto been unmet in order to maintain price levels was now taken up by Indian start-up companies willing to supply the whole market, even where it could barely break even. High quality, comparably very low-cost generics lowered the price bar to medicine access. Thus, when the HIV/AIDS crisis came to India there was an industry able to prevent the travesty that occurred in Africa. 

Consequently, physical therapists and occupational therapists should keep abreast of advances in treating and preventing viral infections. This notion is especially true for the AIDS crisis, which promises to be a major health issue for some time. By keeping informed... 

Yet the trips Agreement has also proved to be problematic from a developed-country perspective. The developed countries have traditionally stood behind their prominent pharmaceutical companies and supported them in their quest for establishing a strong global iprs regime. However, the recent anthrax scare in the usa and the aids crisis in Africa may have altered this relationship. The iprs standards that trips establishes severely limit the government s ability to introduce a radical policy initiative. This can emerge as an unwelcome constraint for any country in crisis. 

The AIDS crisis led to cooperation between the pharmaceutical companies unparalleled since the development of penicillin during the Second World War. Fifteen companies set up an AIDS drug development collaboration programme and government agencies and universities have all joined in. 

More recently, activist groups and disease-based organizations have presented patients as sophisticated rational actors who can review medical information and make informed decisions for themselves. Changes in FDA regulations consequently shifted certain aspects of risk evaluation and decisionmaking control to patients and physicians. Initiatives since the peak of political attention to the AIDS crisis in the early 1990s, notably the 1992 Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) and the 1997 FDA Modernization Act (FDAMA),... 

Robert Gallo became embroiled in a very public controversy with Luc Montagnier over priority to the discovery of the retrovirus HIV as the root cause of AIDS. For a critical description of Gallo s role in the early years of the AIDS crisis, see Shilts, And the Band Played On. 

Mobile outreach units provide information, clean needles and syringes, first aid, crisis intervention and services in locations where drug users meet or to specific target groups, such as sex workers. In France, Ireland and the Netherlands, such mobile units may also provide methadone. 

At that time, the AIDS crisis was rampant. The viral nature of the disease had been established only 5 years earlier, and predictions regarding the spread of the virus were dire. None of the extraordinary drugs available today to combat the devastating effects of the AIDS virus (HIV) existed AZT (3 -deoxy-3 -azidothymidine, 1) was essentially the only treatment available. AZT is a nucleoside analogue that functions as... 

---