AIDS Medication in South Africa
“South Africa and the drug companies have changed forever,” say David Pilling and Nicol degli Innocenti.1 South Africa is to the drug pharmaceutical industry what Vietnam was to the U.S. military. Nothing will be quite the same again. That, at least, is the view of Oxfam, the U.K. charity that has mounted a campaign for affordable medicines in poor countries. With other activist groups, it has championed the cause of the South African government, which has been in a three-year legal tussle with the drug industry about national legislation making it easier to override patents. Yesterday, the drug industry, exhausted by the vitriol that has been heaped upon it, threw in the towel. In return, they appear to have won certain assurances from….

