[e-drug] Re: Act-Up Action Against Pfizer

["Khalil Elouardighi" <gerrold@wanadoo.fr>]

E-drug: Re: Act-Up Action Against Pfizer
---------------------------------------------
Dear Foppe,

It is very true that ARV-recovered immunity prevents cryptococcal 
meningitis better than fluconazole can cure it. But that's only 
prevention :
fluconazole is much better at curing CCM than ARV are, as CCM has a short
vital prognosis and immunity is rather slow to climb up again. So people
*are* dying, by the thousands, from fluconazole overpricing, and Pfizer is
at least an accessory to their demise. Just because ARV are even more
beneficial to PWH&A in general (though not to people with CCM) doesn't make
it right for Pfizer to deliberately exclude 95% of the world's PWH&A from
access to fluconazole. On the contrary, the public health consequences of
Pfizer's pricing policy make it very much "a real issue".

To respond to your comment against calling fluconazole an AIDS drug, I would
like to stress the need for us all to keep in mind the distinction between
AIDS and HIV infection. If the syndrome is characterized by the collection
of opportunistic infections, then certainly fluconazole *is* an AIDS drug,
as there are no such high-prevalence diseases as CCM and thrush in PWH&A
against which fluconazole is of greater interest.
Even in the North with the HAART we still have AIDS, and would never think
to stop using those drugs which fight opportunistic infections under the
pretext that ARV are supposed to control AIDS in the fist place. The rate of
mournings in our community has dropped, but we are all aware that AIDS is
still killing, regularly, even among us with access to HAART and care.
Fluconazole is not the only overpriced drug which is *necessary* to
effectively cure opportunistic infections in HIV+ people. There's not just
HIV drugs which are necessary to out survival. There's also AIDS drugs.

Khalil Elouardighi
ACT UP-Paris
gerrold@wanadoo.fr
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