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Basic Survival Needs and access to Medicines — Coming to Grips with TRIPS: Conversion + Calculation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Rudolf V. Van Puymbroeck
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When 47-year-old Simba Abalo, an unemployed retired soldier in Lomé, Togo, found out that he had AIDS in September 2007, he was unable to receive government-supplied antiretroviral drugs: “CAMEG [the state’s central medicines purchasing organization],” he said, “told me they were not taking any new cases for six months because they had run out of drugs.

Stocks of antiretrovirals had become depleted after the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria suspended part of its grant to Togo in 2006 and failed to approve a new grant request in 2007, reportedly because of oversight irregularities. “Even if they had the drugs,” said Abalo, “I could not have paid more than US$4 a month since I had just lost my job as a security guard earning US$70 a month.”

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Symposium
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , Fall 2010 , pp. 520 - 549
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2010

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