Justice Edwin Cameron of South Africa’s High Court launched a blistering attack on pharmaceutical companies and his country’s government in a keynote address to the Thirteenth World AIDS Conference today in Durban.
"I stand before you because I can purchase health and vigour" said the judge, who was diagnosed with AIDS in 1997. "I am here because I can pay for life itself. To me this seems a monstrous iniquity".
"There are many, many persons in the resource poor world for whom prices, on their own, are the sole impediment to health and well being".
"Our overriding commitment should be to find ways to make accessible for the poor what is within reach of the affluent" he said, demanding immediate and concrete action from all pharmaceutical companies to make their products affordable in the developing world.
He compared the current moral crisis over drug access to the moral dilemmas faced by individual living in Nazi Germany or under South Africa’s apartheid regime.
"Those of us who live affluent lives, well tended by medical care and treatment, should not ask how Germans or white South Africans could tolerate living in proximity to moral evil. We do so ourselves today. Available treatments are denied to those who need them for the sake of aggregating corporate wealth for shareholders who by African standards are almost unimaginably affluent".
At a press conference after the speech, Judge Cameron called on all people in Australasia, North America and Europe with enough resources to consider whether they can make a personal commitment to support medication costs for individuals sick with AIDS in the developing world.
He also dismissed concerns over the dangers of drug resistance due to poor adherence which have led some drug companies, government ministers and clinicians to question the appropriateness of antiretroviral therapy for developing countries.
"It is not an argument against the introduction of computers that computer viruses can be spread", he said in response to the suggestion that South Africa may face an epidemic of drug resistant HIV if it cannot support people taking HAART.
He also slammed the South African government for its failures of leadership throughout the epidemic.
"One would have expected the four years since Vancouver to be filled with actions directed…by those in power towards changing the course of history. Instead, those living with AIDS in resource poor countries have been disappointed. International agencies, national governments, and especially those ho have primary power to remedy the iniquity – the international drug companies – have failed us in the quest for accessible treatment."
"In my own country, a government that in its commitment to human rights and democracy has been a shining example to Africa and the world has at almost every conceivable turn mismanaged the epidemic."
He called for a programme of short-course antiretroviral treatment to prevent mother to child transmission to be instituted immediately in South Africa, and for Western governments to drop any attempts to prevent compulsory licensing and parallel imports of anti-HIV drugs by developing countries.