High quality and affordable generic anti-retrovirals (ARVs) from India have been central to the significant scale-up in the HIV response. Due to generic competition, mainly from India, an ARV treatment regimen which cost R5,000 a month per patient in the late 1990s can be bought today for less than R100 per month. Affordable ARVs have allowed for millions of people to receive treatment, with 6.6 million people worldwide, 1.59 million of whom are in South Africa, on ARVs today. A 2010 study showed that between 2003 and 2008, more than 80% of ARVs used in Africa were purchased from India.
Access to medicines campaigners in India were crucial to ensuring that the government included important public health safe guards in their updated Patents Act. Indian activists have since pushed for these public health safeguards, such as patent oppositions, to be used in order to promote generic competition. These battles have been crucial to high-quality, affordable generic ARVs and other medicines.
But now these hard-fought gains are being threatened: Pharmaceutical companies and powerful northern governments are pushing the Indian government to over-turn essential public health safeguards included in the country’s Patents Act. This threatens medicine access for millions of people across the globe.
Understanding the experience of Indian activists is important for African health activists, government and policy makers campaigning for affordable medicines.
Leena Menghaney, the Indian campaigner for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Access Campaign, will speak about the Indian experience of access to medicines, detailing the campaign for the pro-public health Patents Act; patent oppositions in India; and the current fight against the Swiss drug company Novartis and the controversial Free Trade Agreement currently under negotiation with the European Union. A lawyer by training, Leena has worked for MSF’s Access Campaign since 2005. She is based in New Delhi, India.
She reflects on some of the arguments in the book in 
The Centre for Social Science Research congratulates Beth Vale, who won a Rhodes scholarship last week. Beth is a Master's student in the AIDS and Society Research Unit. Her MA thesis focuses on understandings of care among a group of community health workers.
The CSSR had a strong presence at the conference on HIV in the Humanities and Social Sciences, held in Durban in mid-June. ASRU researchers organised two symposia together with colleagues from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Rebecca Hodes and Annabelle Wienand (both ASRU) presented papers at a symposium on ‘Health horror stories and ‘positive’ portrayals: new research on HIV, TB and the body in the South African media’. Rebecca presented a second paper, and Beth Mills (ASRU/Sussex) also presented, at a symposium on ‘New directions in research on gender and HIV/AIDS in southern Africa’. In another session, Nicoli Nattrass (ASRU) and Clara Rubincam (ASRU/LSE) presented new research on AIDS conspiracy beliefs, using quantitative and qualitative data respectively.