CAMPAIGN FOR ACCESS TO MEDICINES

TAC, SECTION27, and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) launched the Fix the Patent Laws (FTPL) campaign in November 2011 (on the 10-year anniversary of the Doha Declaration). Since then, the campaign has grown to include nearly 50 organisations representing a range of disease areas including cancer, sexual health, non-communicable diseases and mental health. The aim of the FTPL campaign is to reform South Africa’s outdated patent laws so that access to medicines is not unnecessarily limited in South Africa. There are a number of legal safeguards (TRIPS flexibilities) available in international law that have not yet been written into South Africa’s national laws. Section 27 of the Constitution of South Africa obligates the state to implement such law reforms.

TAC will continue to put pressure on the Department of Trade, Industry, and Competition (dtic), the Department of Science and Technology, and other relevant structures to force the urgent reform of our intellectual property laws.

While TB kills around 1.5 million people per year, the entire world only invests around US$0.7bn on TB research every year — this is only a third of the US$2bn that the World Health Organisation estimates is needed.

TB is typical of a wider crisis of underinvestment by both pharmaceutical companies and governments in diseases mainly impacting poor people. TAC will continue to advocate for wider reforms to the medical innovation system that will incentivise more research and development based on global health needs (including new TB medicines and new antibiotics) through initiatives that avoid high prices at the end.

Stockouts and shortages of ARVs, TB medicines, contraceptives and other medicines and health products cause disruption, confusion, cost, and can detrimentally affect long term treatment adherence. Yet stockouts continue to be a major challenge across the country.

The Stop Stockouts Project (SSP) was developed to quickly address issues of stockouts. The SSP is a consortium of five civil society organisations that monitors medicines’ availability in healthcare facilities in South Africa. The SSP engages in ongoing monitoring of stockouts in healthcare facilities. Healthcare workers and public healthcare users are able to report stockouts to the SSP through SMS, phone calls, or a number of other means.