South Africa and Aids drugs
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 2 December 2021
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At the end of the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of people in South Africa were still dying from HIV/Aids because effective drug treatments were prohibitively expensive for a developing country. Under pressure from Aids activists, the government of Nelson Mandela took the big international pharmaceutical companies to court over the right to import cheaper versions of Aids drugs. Bob Howard talks to Bada Pharasi, a former negotiator at South Africa’s department of health.
(Photo: HIV/Aids activists demonstrate in front of an American consulate in South Africa in 2010. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
| 0:06.8 | searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the |
| 0:11.8 | telly we share what we've been watching |
| 0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:24.9 | searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. |
| 0:31.1 | Hello. Hello and thank you for downloading the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:40.4 | This week we're marking World AIDS Day and today Bob Howard is taking us back to South Africa in the 1990s. |
| 0:47.5 | He has the story of how AIDS activists there took on the international drugs companies and won. |
| 0:55.0 | At the end of the 1990s, tens of millions of people across Africa had been infected with HIV and in South Africa |
| 1:05.2 | hundreds of thousands of people were dying from AIDS. They were demanding cheaper |
| 1:09.6 | drugs but the big pharmaceutical companies didn't want to play ball. |
| 1:13.6 | We ask you one thing. |
| 1:14.8 | Join our hands to fight the drug companies. |
| 1:17.8 | My name is Baraparazzi. |
| 1:19.8 | I joined the Department of Health in 1995. The issue which preoccupied most ordinary South Africans who were ill was the |
| 1:27.3 | cost of buying drugs. New drugs like the ones used for fighting HIV were |
| 1:32.4 | relatively expensive. |
| 1:34.0 | Most of our medicines were imported. |
| 1:37.0 | The bulk of the drugs were brought into the country at very high prices. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.