The Cost of Living - Thailand

March 2001 Twenty-nine year old Pramote lives in Bangkok and has AIDS. If he'd been able to afford the drugs now routinely prescribed for HIV-positive people in the West, he wouldn't be paralysed and bedridden today. Ninety per cent of the people infected with HIV today live in developing countries, and most don't have access to the drugs that could keep them alive because they are simply too expensive for their national health services. This Life programme investigates what happened when Thailand and South Africa applied to use compulsory licences and parallel importing - practices agreed under World Trade Organisation guidelines - to make their own generic versions of anti-retroviral drugs to halt the AIDS epidemic in their countries.