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All the right thinking people in this world should raise their voice in support of the around 1.4 million people living with HIV and AIDS in Kenya in their fight against a law, Anti-Counterfeit Act, which will deny them access to cheaper medicines. Of courses, a host of NGOs have vowed to fight the case.
The Act allows only patented drugs, promoted by MNCs, to be sold in the country as the generic drugs, which are in some cases 90 per cent cheaper than patented drugs, will be treated as spurious drugs. The Act has already been passed, learnt to be under MNCs pressure, but the government is yet to enact it.
Once this Act is enacted, it in all practical purposes, means death sentence to millions of people suffering from HIV/AIDS as they can ill afford the medicines marketed by MNCs. After Kenya, several other African countries, reportedly under MNCs pressure, are following the Kenyan way.
The Sub Saharan Africa, includng Kenya, is by far the worst-affected in the world by the AIDS epidemic. The region has just over 10% of the world’s population, but is home to 67% of all people living with HIV. An estimated 1.9 million adults and children became infected with HIV during 2007. This brought the total number of people living with HIV/AIDS in the region to 22 million by the end of the year. There are around 40 million HIV affected people in the world.
With its eye on this huge market, the MNCs have been spreading its propaganda against the generic drugs in the African countries which has resulted in some countries like Kenya and Uganda coming out with anti-counterfeit bills.
The NGOs have challenged the Act in court. It is time all right thinking people raise their voice against the injustice being meted out to poor people of African countries who can only afford cheaper medicines.
RSS 
No such thing as HIV/AIDS.
AIDS is a new name given by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to a collection of 29 familiar illnesses such as yeast infection, herpes, diarrhea, some pneumonias, certain cancers, salmonella, and tuberculosis. The AIDS category was a creation of the CDC. Since 1981, the surveillance tool AIDS has been used to track and record familiar diseases when they appear in people who have tested positive for antibodies associated with HIV.
A person is diagnosed with AIDS if he or she has one or more of the 29 official AIDS-defining conditions and if he or she tested positive for antibodies associated with HIV. However, these 29 old diseases and conditions were not thought to have a single, common cause prior to the creation of the AIDS category. They also used to have documented causes and treatments not related to HIV. AIDS diseases existed before the adoption of the name “AIDS.”
None of these conditions appears exclusively in people who test HIV positive, while all appear among people who test HIV negative.
In other words, pneumonia in a person who tests HIV positive is AIDS, while the same pneumonia in a person testing HIV negative is pneumonia.
On January 1, 1993, the CDC expanded the definition of AIDS to include people with a T cell count of 200 or less who have no illness or symptoms. This new definition caused the number of AIDS cases in America to double overnight.
Also, one can have a diagnosis of AIDS without ever having an HIV test. This is referred to as a “presumptive diagnosis.” Even if the only difference between “pneumonia” and “AIDS” is a positive HIV test, the test is not required for a diagnosis of AIDS.
Since AIDS is not a disease, and there is no single, universally accepted definition for AIDS, the conditions that are called AIDS vary from country to country. For example, Canada’s Laboratory Centre for Disease Control (LCDC) does not recognize the American T cell count criterion for AIDS. This means that a certain percentage of American AIDS patients would not have AIDS if they were in Canada.
The World Health Organization (WHO) employs two distinctly different definitions for AIDS in Africa, neither of which conforms to the criteria for American AIDS or Canadian AIDS. The diagnostic definition most commonly used in Africa does not require an HIV test, only that a patient has at least one of three major clinical symptoms (weight loss, fever and/or cough), plus one “minor sign” such as generalized itching or swollen glands.
So you see, Big Pharma is big business. Without the ’AIDS scare,’ people such as Bill Gates won’t give that much money, and hence won’t have tax shelters that go by the name of philanthropy.