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Show THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH CHARLES H. MONSON PRIZE WINNER ACCESSIBILITY TO HIV/AIDS MEDICATIONS IN RESOURCE-LIMITED COUNTRIES Madeleine Oritt (Stephen Alder) Department of International Studies (student) Department of Family and Preventive Medicine (faculty) University of Utah Introduction Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and its precursor, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), represent one of the most confounding and frightening epidemics of the 20th and 21st centuries. Their spread is rapid, particularly in low-income countries, where infrastructure, public education and access to medical care and treatment are severely lacking. Furthermore, although HIV/AIDS began spreading across the world more than 40 years ago, a cure has yet to be discovered (Avert). However, drugs have been developed to prevent the replication of HIV within the body, which precludes the transformation of the virus into AIDS. These antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) keep HIV patients healthy and able to maintain a relatively high quality of life (A.D.A.M. Medical Encyclopedia, 2011). This represents a vast improvement from the situation after the initial outbreak of HIV/AIDS, w h e n such drugs had yet to be developed and a positive diagnosis was equivalent to a death sentence. Even today, however, ARVs are not available to everyone. Their extremely high price makes them largely out of reach of the vast majority of people living with HIV/AIDS: those in low-income countries, particularly the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. However, a 1994 agreement by the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), created provisions by which such countries could obtain or manufacture HIV/AIDS drugs at reduced prices, through various means including parallel importing and compulsory licensing. The agreement also affirmed the intellectual property rights of pharmaceutical companies over their drugs, effectively juxtaposing the public health crisis of HIV/AIDS and the maintenance of exclusive patent rights by pharmaceutical companies (Haakonsson & Richey, 2007). In this paper, I posit that the failure to treat those infected with HIV/AIDS is primarily and principally due to the high cost of the drugs, as a result of stringent patent protection and intellectual property regulations. There is an acute need for vastly lower prices for HIV/AIDS drugs in order to treat the epidemic that has killed over 25 million people to date (A.D.A.M. Medical Encyclopedia). M y examination of this issue will begin with an introduction to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, with a focus on its impact in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as basic information about drugs used to treat HIV/AIDS, including ARVs. I will then present research about the history of patent protection and intellectual property rights, particularly as they affect the pharmaceutical industry. In this section, I will discuss the TRIPS agreement and its provisions to enable low-income countries suffering from public health emergencies to access essential medications via specially sanctioned routes, such as parallel importation and compulsory licensing. The positive and negative repercussions of this agreement will be analyzed, and the emerging proposed solution of patent pools, as well as their merits and drawbacks, will be presented. Finally, as a culmination of research, the conclusion will assess the progress that has been made, and the tremendous need for further progress in order to ameliorate the effects of this devastating virus. M |