Helping the Sick
May 25th, 2005 at 7:14 am by Susie
It really kills me, how Bush takes credit for helping the international AIDS effort when all he did was use it as cover for Big Pharma:
More than 78,000 Guatemalans are currently living with HIV/AIDS , according to Doctors Without Borders (also called Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF). Approximately 13,500 of them are in urgent need of antiretroviral (ARV) treatment; only 3,600 were receiving it as of December 2004. If, in coming weeks, Congress ratifies the bill President Bush signed last year — the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) — many of these patients could wind up literally dying for cheap drugs.According to groups such as Oxfam and MSF, CAFTA’s intellectual property protections will give monopoly-like status to high-priced, brand-name drugs in poor markets; potentially killing off generics in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras and the Dominican Republic, and preventing millions of AIDS patients from being able to afford the meds they need.
