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India - News
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News Updates - 27 February
2001 Easy riders - Industry Standard High-tech leaders unite for India's disaster relief - CNN Clinton lays out plans for India - Associated Press The Good Doctor (Yusuf Hamied) -Wash. Post/ Chicago Trib/ Reuters/ TIME Easy
Riders Early retirement is the ultimate new-economy dream. Put in the 80-hour weeks, live on Jolt and free snacks, cash in the options when you hit 30 and head for Tahiti. It's a nice job if you can get it – and one that's no dream for those lucky few who managed to cash out before Wall Street's music stopped. For the entrepreneurs and high-tech executives who have amassed enough wealth, today's new retirement is about taking chances, giving back and staying involved in the business community. Today's retirees are volunteering, taking part-time dream jobs or starting new careers. And even those who manage to stay out of the office are spending more time on advisory boards than on surfboards. PROFESSIONAL
VOLUNTEERS Now, with the financial support of a healthy retirement package from Big Blue, he spends several hours a day as a volunteer business mentor at The Indus Entrepreneurs (TIE), a San Jose collective of South Asian executives. Joshi is definitely giving back. He was recently elected president of Indus Entrepreneurs and now spends even more hours working for the organization. He says working with young entrepreneurs gives him a sense of satisfaction that he didn't realize he was missing: "It's a labor of love." As a slogan for the new retirement, "labors of love" could be just right.
Entrepreneurs and technology leaders are uniting with relief organizations like CARE to help both victims and relief workers caught in India's earthquake, which ravaged the Gujarat state on January 26. "The Internet has played a very valuable role in both getting the word out and also getting information into the hands of the right people," said Akhtar Badshah, executive director of Digital Partners. Digital Partners, a non-profit research institute and CARE have teamed up to help India. They say they've raised almost half a million dollars to assist the stricken region. Long-term assistance sought But the focus for many businesses in Silicon Valley is to provide long-term assistance to India and develop an emergency response infrastructure for future disasters. The IndUS Entrepreneurs is a non-profit network of tech entrepreneurs and professionals. They have started a program on their Web site called the United Community Appeal for India. Their goal is to raise millions of dollars for the Gujarat Earthquake relief effort. "We are able to help the country in a time of great need. And Silicon Valley is where a lot of wealth has been created, particularly in recent years," said Kailash Joshi, director of the IndUS Entrepreneurs. Many technology leaders who've experienced the wealth and benefits of the industry say it's their social responsibility to give back and assist others in this difficult time of need. Sounding
presidential, Clinton lays out plans for India NEW YORK - Sounding his most presidential since leaving office, Bill Clinton took to the podium with new plans to improve housing, health care, education and financial well-being in earthquake-ravaged India. A week after leaving office, Clinton helped found a group called Americans for Indian Relief and Reconstruction, which he said would help some of the 400 villages most devastated by the Jan. 26 earthquake. "Our objective will be to help deal with the housing issues, the health care issues, the education issues, the clean water issue ... and try to give entrepreneurs the chance to make the most of a terrible situation," Clinton told 200 Indian Americans at Thursday's benefit dinner to help earthquake victims. The model could become an example for poor areas around the world as well as inner cities and poor rural areas in America, he said. Clinton said he would travel to India in about six weeks to help with the relief efforts. The relief group is to promote long-term reconstruction in some 40 Indian villages and offer aid to 100 villages destroyed by the earthquake, Clinton said. Among other things, the group hopes to put an Internet connection and a printer in every village. He estimated the cost for housing, health care, education, clean water, and loans would be about $500,000 per village, adding up to about $20 million for 40 villages and about $50 million for 100 villages. The $250-a-plate benefit dinner and an art auction were sponsored by the Indo-American Arts Council, which hoped to raise up to $200,000.
NAIROBI - Jesuit priest, Rev. Angelo D'Agostino, a former Georgetown University Hospital medical professor who runs the small Nyumbani home for orphans with AIDS or HIV in suburban Nairobi, said today that he will import deeply discounted antiretroviral medicines from Cipla Ltd. of Bombay. "I am sick and tired of doing funerals," D'Agostino said. Although he estimated that the discounted drugs might be sufficient to treat only 20 of the 70 children at his orphanage, his efforts reflect increasing willingness of non-governmental organizations and AIDS activists to defy national regulations and international patent rules to buy cheaper, generic AIDS drugs. Cipla's chairman, Yusuf Hamied, made headlines two weeks ago when he announced that, by taking advantage of World Trade Organization rules that permit countries to suspend patents in the event of national emergency, he would sell a combination of three generic antiretroviral medicines for as little as $350 for a year's supply for one person; similar treatment in the United States costs $10,000. Cipla's offer amounted to an open challenge to major pharmaceutical companies that hold the patents on many such AIDS drugs and have worked hard to control prices. Antiretroviral drugs are the components of the "triple-drug cocktail" that has been found to delay or prevent the onset of AIDS in patients infected with HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus. In addition,officials with Doctors Without Borders said loopholes in existing law may allow D'Agostino to import the drugs before new legislation is passed. "I'm hoping the government will transcend the restrictions and allow [the drugs] in," said D'Agostino. "The companies might put up some static, but I don't think the government, in the interest of the people, will give us any problem." Nine months of negotiations later, Western pharmaceutical companies reached agreements with only three countries. And the deals, with Senegal, Uganda and Rwanda, will provide medicine for fewer than 3,000 of the 1.3 million infected with HIV in those countries. Throughout the continent, an estimated 22 million people are infected; 11 million have already died of AIDS-related causes. "It's really the darker side of capitalism, the greed that is being manifest by these drug companies holding sub-Saharan Africa hostage," said D'Agostino. "People are dying because they can't afford their prices." "We wonder what sacrifices are going to be made at the altar of profit," said Chris Ouma, a Nairobi physician with Action Aid Kenya. "Which is more deadly to Africa? Is it HIV, or is it the businessmen who have briefcases of patent applications?" Such rhetoric - far bolder than was heard in this part of Africa just months ago - reflects the momentum that has gathered behind the AIDS drug campaign led by Doctors Without Borders. The movement scored a major victory in December 1999 when President Bill Clinton issued an executive order barring the U.S. trade office from challenging African nations that wanted to import or manufacture generics, while paying a royalty to the patent holder. But the effect of Cipla's price cut this month was tectonic. Hamied, the company chairman, said the $350 annual rate for a triple-drug cocktail was "a humanitarian price," subsidized by his firm and available only to Doctors Without Borders, which operates pilot programs involving only a few thousand patients. Governments would have to pay $600 for a year's supply of the same three-drug combination of stavudine, lamivudine and nevirapine. "It's time the international community looked at it from a more human point of view," Hamied said. Kenya
charities demand generic AIDS drugs NAIROBI - Kenyan charities on Wednesday accused international drug companies of denying Africa's AIDS patients access to adequate care and for much cheaper generic drugs to be imported from India and Brazil. The Kenya Coalition of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) said the world's largest pharmaceutical companies were clinging to patent laws that effectively denied AIDS patients access to affordable drugs. It said that ongoing negotiations over proposed reductions in the price of antiretroviral drugs were moving too slowly, and that they suspected foul play. "We see negotiations as a technique in time-wasting," said Chris Ouma, the HIV/AIDS coordinator for Action Aid in Kenya. He said drug companies promised last May to lower the price of antiretroviral drugs by 85 percent, but have so far failed to keep the promise. Medical
group will provide free AIDS drugs in 10 countries BOMBAY, INDIA - An international aid agency said it will distribute an Indian company's anti-AIDS drugs free of charge in 10 countries. Doctors Without Borders will buy the drugs from the Indian company Cipla Ltd., which on Feb. 7 offered to sell a three-drug anti-retroviral cocktail to the group for $350 a person per year (less than $1 a day) if the agency agreed to distribute it for free and took care of the legalities of importing it. "In general, where the Cipla drug will be used, it will be supplied free of cost. Wherever it is purchased by governments, it would be sold at reduced prices," Daniel Berman of the agency's Access to Essential Medicines campaign said Friday. Berman said the agency will begin distributing the drugs in the next couple of months. He wouldn't name the 10 countries but said the program is under way in Thailand and Cameroon. The Good Doctor - Yusuf Hamied's AIDS drug offer has international drug makers
in a tizzy Cipla's Yusuf Hamied has international drug makers in a tizz. When Yusuf K. Hamied lost a friend to HIV, the bug that causes AIDS, several years ago, he was understandably devastasted. But what he had witnessed, the slow ravaging of his friend's body with nothing to alleviate the suffering, left him in shock. So Hamied, an organic chemist and the owner of one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in India, made it his mission to find the "magic" drug. When Glaxo Wellcome's AZT and 3TC drug cocktail hit the market in the mid-'90s, with promising results, Hamied set his researchers to work. Under Indian law, patented drugs can be manufactured as long as the process is different from the one that is patented. Cipla is therefore able to make copies of drugs at a fraction of the original cost because manufacturing overheads in India are extremely low. "Earlier, to be found HIV-positive was like giving a person a death sentence," says Hamied. "Today HIV is not a death sentence. It is a chronic disease. So if somebody has HIV, he or she can be treated." That's true, but only if they can afford the necessary drugs. The British aid organization, Oxfam, last week started a campaign to stall trade regulations on pharmaceutical companies that will come into effect in 2005. Cheap, locally produced drugs like those made by Cipla, will then become illegal. Medicines are meant to save lives, not make huge profits for the companies behind them. That, says Hamied, is partly why he made the offer to Medecins Sans Frontieres. "I do not have an ulterior motive. At my age what ulterior motive can I have," protests Hamied, who is 64. "Just use the bloody thing. So what if I don't make a profit on AIDS drugs. That is not the be all or end all." But Hamied says what really moved him to act was the Jan. 26 earthquake in Gujarat, India, that killed upwards of 40,000 people, possibly many more. Cipla says it has been offering AIDS drugs to the world -- and "at cost" in India -- for years. Hamied had first suggested a drop in commercial rates to the European Union last November. "We had offered to the international community the same three-drug cocktail at $800, which I have now reduced to $600," he says. "I also offered technology free of charge to any government." Medecins Sans Frontieres, however, pointed out that the drugs, like the cocktail sold by Glaxo, was developed with U.S. public funds and that the company had already made millions out of sales. Hamied says these companies did not spend money on research, but were merely paying royalty to labs like Yale in the U.S. that actually developed the drug. "Of the top 25 products sold today," says Hamied, "half were not developed by the person that is marketing them." Responding to accusations of piracy from the multinationals, Hamied says: "To say all Indians are pirates is very good PR." "If I am a pirate, I am a thief. If I am a thief I have broken a law. But I abide by the laws of the land. No one can accuse me of breaking laws." He points out that no Indian drug manufacturer has been litigated against in the last 30 years. |
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