Good drug smugglers? (Africa).The French agency Doctors Without Borders Doctors Without Borders, Fr. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), international organization that provides emergency medical assistance to people suffering from a natural or societal disaster, such as an earthquake or war. and the South African AIDS activist group Treatment Action Campaign are smuggling smuggling, illegal transport across state or national boundaries of goods or persons liable to customs or to prohibition. Smuggling has been carried on in nearly all nations and has occasionally been adopted as an instrument of national policy, as by Great Britain cheaper generic versions of three anti-retroviral AIDS drugs from Brazil into South Africa, flouting local patent protection laws. "We have seen first-hand that these drugs can be used safely and effectively here in South Africa," said Eric Goemaere of Doctors Without Borders. "It is our duty to offer these benefits to as many patients as possible." Importing the generic medications lowers the daily cost per patient from $3.20 to $1.55. Only the more expensive patented drugs are legally available in South Africa, the country with the world's largest population of people living with HIV/AIDS HIV/AIDS Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome . Patent-holder GlaxoSmithKline said it would deal with patent infringements case by case. The death toll from AIDS will soon overtake the plague as history's most deadly pandemic pandemic /pan·dem·ic/ (pan-dem´ik) 1. a widespread epidemic of a disease. 2. widely epidemic. pan·dem·ic adj. Epidemic over a wide geographic area. n. . |
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