I meant to post this yesterday and now invoke my ethnic background to excuse my tardiness.
While my laptop’s already suffering from too much spyware to withstand finding a cure for HIV, I did want to note World AIDS Day in some way. Via Anupam Chander, I see that HIV+ women in Golaghat, Assam joined a rally “to acknowledge they are living with AIDS and should not be shunned.” From what I can tell, India is doing surprisingly well, particularly compared to some African nations, in admitting its HIV crisis. When I last visited in 2003, there were bilboards with giant pictures of condoms, which is something I’ve never seen even in Houston or Dallas, where conservatism appear to be greater than in Bombay and Hyderabad. Though the government is unwilling to say just how big the population of HIV+ Indians is — as a NYT editorial puts it, “India is providing numbers no one believes” — it has not gone through the lengthy period of denial that the U.S. government did in the 1980s, which allowed HIV to threaten to become epidemic among margnialized groups.
The problem now is getting treatment to sufferers, and unlike the issue of accepting the existence of the disease (though that certainly is far from complete, and contributes to the difficulty of accessing treatment), seems likely to get worse, not better. The WTO is supposed to be giving developing nations more time to comply with patent rules, but Indian already reformed its laws last year. This has had the benefit of drawing large pharmaceutical companies who previously feared that their investments would be unprotected. On the downside, however, are millions of Indians who cannot afford the cost of a patented drug and whose salvation previously had been the cheap generics that local drug makers had pirated.
Fierce advocates of intellectual property claim that no cure for HIV/ AIDS ever will be found if pharmaceutical companies cannot be secure in reaping the rewards of past R&D and in making money from any future discoveries. I take little stock in this argument for several reasons, chiefly because the initial round of treatment medications developed during the late 1980s were funded by grants from the government and medical foundations, but also because I think there is sufficient incentive to commit resources for a cure even if some developing nations do not respect the patent on it.
In the short term, the cost of patent-protected AIDS treatment is prohibitively high, and the lure of more pharmaceutical companies’ working on a cure doesn’t outweigh the negative of the patients who will die — often orphaning children thereby — without medication.
Random Note: When I was in high school and convincing my parents that I should go to law school, I used to gather examples just of Indian Americans in the legal field. Now that there are so many — there’s even a desi helping to lead the Federalist Society, one of the whitest games in town — I’m focusing on Indian law professors, who have gone the extra step of becoming academics instead of enslaving themselves to Skadden.
Chander is one. Another is Anup Malani, a professor at my alma mater currently visiting UChicago Law and posting on their faculty blog. Or at least he’s listed on the sidebar; I haven’t spotted a post from him yet, not even in response to Martha Nussbaum’s multi-part on “India: A Democracys Near Collapse into Religious Terror.” Nussbaum’s been on this tear for some time.
