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On 2016/05/20 12:59 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/19/florida-man-kills-wife-medication-not-affordable
I think the biggest miracle I've witnessed here in South Africa - a more profound challenge to illegitimate power than anything since, and perhaps including, the 1994 transition from racial (to class) apartheid - was seeing friends recover from opportunistic AIDS infections because they could get antiretroviral ARV medicines for free over the last 10 years or so, here in the city with the highest # of HIV+ residents, Durban.
That was only possible because of extraordinary activism which lowered the price of ARVs from $15,000/year in the early 2000s. From 1999-2004, the Treatment Action Campaign militants fought Big Pharma, the US and SA political regimes, the World Trade Organisation and the whole idea of Intellectual Property, and eventually won. Life expectancy in South Africa has risen from 52 a decade ago to 62 today as a result.
One of the great leaders of that struggle, Vuyiseka Dubula (disclosure: I co-supervise her PhD) discusses it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2gEbUcFle4
It's an inspiration, hopefully to the US comrades who need to follow this example to limit extreme medicines profiteering.
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