HIV protesters tell India to defy EU drug demands

(NEW DELHI) - Thousands of HIV-positive protesters called on the Indian government on Wednesday to reject EU trade demands they said would make lifesaving drugs unaffordable to millions of people with the virus.

More than 2,000 demonstrators from India and other Asian countries marched through downtown New Delhi carrying banners reading "Don't trade away our lives" and staged a lie-in.

The European Union (EU) is seeking provisions in a proposed trade deal that would push prices of generic drugs made in India beyond the reach of people with the HIV virus in developing countries, said the protesters.

"More than 80 percent of the AIDS drugs our medical practitioners use to treat 175,000 people in developing countries are affordable generics from India," said Paul Cawthorne, a spokesman for Paris-based humanitarian group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF).

"Beyond AIDS, we rely on producers in India for drugs to treat other illnesses, such as tuberculosis and malaria. We can not afford to let our patients' lifeline be cut," Cawthorne said.

Affordable medicines produced in India have played a major role in scaling up HIV/AIDS treatment to more than five million people in developing countries, MSF said.

Indian-made generics have pushed the average yearly cost of anti-HIV drug treatments down from $10,000 per patient in 2000 to $70 in 2010.

"We all rely on affordable medicines made here in India to stay alive," said Nepal-based Rajiv Kafle, of the Asia Pacific Network of Positive People.

"We don't want to go back in time, to when our friends and loved ones died because they couldn't afford the medicines they needed," Kafle said.

The EU is demanding intellectual property provisions in the free trade agreement that exceed what international trade rules require, MSF said.

The most damaging measure is "data exclusivity" which would act like a patent and block more affordable generic medicines from the market, even for drugs that are already off patent, the group said.

"It would be a colossal mistake to introduce data exclusivity in India, when millions of people across the globe depend on the country as the pharmacy of the developing world'," said Anand Grover, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health.

The protest was staged to coincide with "sensitive" negotiations in Brussels between India and the 27-member EU on the market-opening pact, which has been under discussion since 2007, MSF said.