Claude Moraes MEP meets leading AIDS Activists and Health MPs in South Africa to promote "access to medicines".

Claude Moraes MEP called for stronger action by the EU to ensure that pharmaceutical companies pursue fair pricing of key drugs to tackle HIV/AIDS and related conditions currently ravaging South Africa and other developing nations.

Meeting with HIV/AIDS activist Zackie Achmat at a Cape Town crisis centre he said:

"It is vital that the EU works flat out with South African NGOs and the government to ensure adequate affordable supplies of anti-retroviral treatment including the drug neviropine which can be administered to pregnant women.

No one underestimates the crisis facing South Africa - without a campaign to make treatment available to all, an estimated 5-6 million South Africans will die of AIDS by 2010. It is a gruelling uphill task, and we in the west should help, not hinder, the efforts to make treatment available".

The clock is ticking too, for Zackie Achmat, who refuses anti-retrovirals for himself until they are available to more South Africans. Meanwhile he fights his own fatal HIV/AIDS related illness.

For more information on "Access to Medicines" see the work and articles sections of this site.

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