Indian drug makers say Kenya’s counterfeit law law will wipe out their mar

Last September, Kenyan health activists said the law could threaten the flow of much needed medicines for such public health problems such as HIV/Aids and malaria.

“The Bill contains various ambiguities, which if misinterpreted or abused would be detrimental to the government’s ongoing efforts to ensure access to essential medicines for all Kenyans,” James Kamau of the Kenya Access Treatment Movement (Ketam) told The EastAfrican then.

The movement is primarily concerned with the treatment and management of HIV.

The Anti-Counterfeit Bill was first published in 2007, but lapsed when parliament was dissolved to pave the way for the general election.

The Bill was republished on July 1, 2008 as the Anti-Counterfeit Bill before its passing in December of the same year.

The law is supposed to protect Kenyans against counterfeits, which are defined as imitations that are made with the intent to deceptively represent content or origins.

Analysts say that counterfeit goods, mainly from Asian countries and China, cost the Kenyan economy millions of dollars each year.

Mr Shah’s letter also alleged, according to the paper, that African countries did not support India during the formulation of the definition of what constitutes pharmaceutical counterfeits at the World Health Assembly meeting in May 2008 in Geneva, which did not augur well for the country’s export sector.

According to the Bill, counterfeiting is “the manufacture, production, packaging, re-packaging, labelling or making, whether in Kenya or elsewhere, of any goods whereby those protected goods are imitated in such manner and to such a degree that those other goods are identical or substantially similar copies of the protected goods.”