OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town |
A SOUTH African actor on Saturday brought a controversial consignment of generic HIV and Aids drugs into the country, which will be used by the Cape-based Treatment Action Campaign (TAC).
Morne Visser, was met by a an emotional group of activists at the Cape Town International Airport as he brought in the consignment of 1_600 Biozole from Malaysia.
Nathan Geffen of the TAC said Visser, who acts in Save Our Souls on e.tv on Thursday nights, was on holiday in the Far East and decided to bring back the drugs.
“Morne is just an ordinary guy doing it for the good of people living with Aids,” Geffen said. The tablets were the remainder of a shipment, originally brought into the country illegally by TAC.
TAC chairman Zackie Achmat handed himself over to police on October 20 last year for illegally bringing in the first assignment of 3_000 tablets, which was confiscated by the national health department.
Geffen said the TAC got a Section 21 exemption on the drug from the Medical Control Council.
The second consignment will be enough supply for about 100 people for a month and has been supplied free of charge by TAC.
Biozole is the generic equivalent of Diflucan, a drug manufactured by pharmaceutical company Pfeizer. It is used for the treatment of systemic thrush and a rare form of meningitis, a common complication of Aids.
Geffen said TAC was encouraging the government to import Biozole, which he said would cost it about R2 a tablet as opposed to about R28 per tablet of the patented medicine.
However, in May last year Pfeizer offered the drug to government free of charge for two years.
Geffen believed Pfeizer’s offer had been in bad faith and that the free drugs would only be available in March, or later, while people continued to die of complications.
He claimed that Pfeizer was dragging its feet in providing the drug, which would be available in an altered dosage form and therefore had to be retested.
Pharmaceutical Manufacturer’s Association of South Africa chief executive Mirryena Deeb expressed concern at the exemption granted to TAC.
“Allowing the exemption is a misuse of the Medicine Control Act, and will pave he way for all dealers of illegal medicine to do the same thing whether their intentions are good or bad,” she said.
She said that the Biozole had not been subjected to a more thorough comparative test to ensure that the drug had the same amount of active ingredient as the registered drug as well as comparative additives.