 How can you join Roche? You can come with us. We are all here. We are going to the Roche commercial satellite to basically protest against the high prices for pigilated interferon. So what we are going to do is we are going to tell them to reduce prices because most of the people in the world cannot access treatment for hepatitis C. What happens if someone gets hep C? Well hepatitis C, it's a virus and it essentially causes degeneration of the liver and it can lead to fibrosis and cirrhosis, liver cancer. There's 170 million people estimated to be living with hepatitis C globally and the majority of them have no access to treatment. Where studies have been done among injecting drug users. They have found ranges between 50 and 100% hepatitis C prevalence. You know the reason they have this nice buffet is because they are charging people for the drugs. That's the problem. Yeah, we should need this. I am not kidding. Distinguished audience, I'm sorry for interrupting this scientific session but as you probably know it is sponsored by Roche. Roche is one of two companies who is producing the pigilated interferon treatment for hepatitis C. Hepatitis C treatment costs so much and this drug has been on the market so long and people cannot afford buying this treatment and governments cannot afford buying this treatment and because of it people are dying. We call on Roche and as well on Merck to reduce prices on pigilated interferon immediately all over the world. Eating our liver. I'm living displayed with the liver and the petition, the waiting list for hepatitis C treatment that we are gathering the signatures under right now. There are going to be a million signatures under this list and until Roche and Merck won't get this pricing down we will bring these livers to every meeting where we will meet them. Egypt, the same medicines cost only $2,000 and it's because Egypt has produced their own version of pigilated interferon and once that came to the market it dropped the prices of the brand name suppliers down substantially and so I think this is another example that these companies can reduce their prices if they're pressurized and that generic competition is the most effective way of driving these prices down. Can you explain us what are generic medicines? Generic medicines are copies of brand name medicines. Generics that have been pre-approved by the World Health Organization are just as effective as brand name drugs but they're much cheaper because of basic economics. When you have multiple competitors competing they're producing high quality at lower prices. What is the role of pharmaceutical companies in increasing prices of HIV medicines? Big Pharma has made billions and billions in profits off of the antiretrovirals that keep so many people alive so you still have a situation in which ARVs and various other drugs are still massively too expensive when patented and this is the fight that's going on still. Companies make medicines and they put pharmaceutical patents on those medicines which gives them the exclusive right to produce and market that medicine in a given country where that patent is valid for a minimum period of 20 years and that means that no one else can make copies that are more affordable and because it's a monopolistic system they can set the price at whatever they want. What Big Pharma is doing is they're pushing for laws that will maintain high pharmaceutical prices which so far have been the main barrier to us achieving universal access to treatment so what they're really doing is they're actually letting people die for the sake of their profits. Some of the big pharma lobbyists say that we can't reduce the prices because we need to fund research. How would you command this argument? Most research is actually funded by public funds. A lot of the research is done in universities which then sell the rights to the pharmaceutical industry. It's estimated they say at $1.3 billion to bring any drug to market to develop these medicines. Evidence is showing that that is not the case at all that it is actually far cheaper to develop these medicines. Most of these pharmaceutical profits are actually being used for marketing. Big Pharma's ideology is to make believe that patents and the monopoly is good for research and for innovation but that's totally wrong. Studies and history show that the increasing enforcement of intellectual property for decades is linked with a total drop of the research and of the innovation. There are not new drugs right now. Some of the new policies that are being pursued by the US government like the Trans-Pacific Trade Agreements are going to take this all to a whole new level. The Trans-Pacific Trade Agreement, the United States government is pushing countries in the Pacific region, nine countries to be specific to adopt patent regulation that would be much more strict so it would further limit access to generic drugs, further increase prices. It's a radical change for intellectual property rules and would give drug companies tons of new rights. Things that are in there are things like patent term extension so extending the term of patents beyond 20 years. They would be able to get patents on old drugs just by changing them a little bit, right? The proposals would actually outlaw the ability of civil society to challenge a patent before it's granted which is a basic democratic idea and yet the United States government is trying to outlaw that. Everyone is really trying to put pressure on the US government to hold back on these negotiations. In the United States specifically there are over 600 advisors that are involved in preparing it. None of them are civil society. They are all drug company executives. And so what we have instead is a total lockout not only of patient groups, not only of civil society but actually even of elected officials, members of the US Congress and legislators haven't been able to see the text. We've gotten it leaked from other countries who have said this is outrageous. It's been actually relatively shocking to see the US government's administration that came in promising that they would break the stranglehold of drug companies over these key drugs instead doing exactly the opposite and being pharma's lapdog and carrying the water of big pharma and doing whatever they want. What is the role the EU plays in this struggle? Well what the EU is trying to do is also really disgusting. India has been the world's pharmacy. We to a great degree have India to thank the levels of treatment access that we see in Africa and many developing countries. And what the EU is trying to do is limit India's ability to continue to produce cheap drugs. If Europe is successful in these negotiations we're going to see exorbitant prices and we're going to see lowered access in the developing countries of the world. In a time of financial crisis when we need to be making things more efficient. This is a situation that affects not only people living with HIV it actually affects people living in all kinds of chronic conditions, cancer and other medical conditions. So I think we need to reach out to the broader population of people with the message that treatment and life-saving drugs are a right, not a privilege. To join us for the minute of silence to remember those of our friends, colleagues, relatives who had died without access to this life-saving treatment. Thank you.