"Current Efforts Meager!"
Shareholders Challenge Abbott to Treat AIDS Pandemic in Africa with Affordable Drugs

Contact: REGINA MURPHY, 212-870-2317; rmurphy@iccr.org

Calling the company's current AIDS treatment programs "meager", religious and union shareholders are challenging Abbott Laboratories to make life-saving HIV/AIDS medicines accessible and affordable in African countries where AIDS is pandemic.

Eight institutions are sponsoring a shareholder resolution calling on Abbott to "provide pharmaceuticals for the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria in ways that the majority of infected persons in African nations can afford." Shareholders vote on the resolution at Abbott's April 26 meeting in Chicago.

"Compared to other U.S. pharmaceutical companies, Abbott's initiatives in Africa are smaller in size, scope, focus and impact than any of its major competitors," charges Doris Gormley, sfcc, representing five U.S.-based Jesuit funds, sponsoring the resolution. "Instead of providing leadership to battle the pandemic, Abbott is avoiding the seven countries of southern Africa where infection rates are highest."

Resolution sponsors criticize Abbott for focusing treatment programs in Burkina Faso and Tanzania, nations with low infection rates. In African nations with high infection rates the company supports voluntary counseling, education and testing instead of affordable treatment.

The sponsors are particularly frustrated with Abbott's meager efforts because the company was among the first to develop treatment drugs for AIDS, according to Sr. Gormley. "Abbott must make a profit but it also has a unique mission to provide medicines, often making the difference between life and death."

The resolution sponsors are five Jesuit Provinces -- California, Chicago, Detroit, Maryland, Oregon; Christian Brothers Investment Services; the Women's Division of the General Board of Global Ministries, United Methodist Church; and Amalgamated Bank Longview Collective Investment Fund, a labor-affiliated institution.

Religious sponsors are members of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), an association of 275 socially responsible religious institutional investors, who use their portfolios, altogether worth an estimated $110 billion, to hold companies socially and environmentally responsible. Since 1993 ICCR has pressed pharmaceutical companies to make prescription drugs available and affordable to all.

"Many ICCR members have workers in Africa and sister relationships with religious and aid institutions in Africa," explained Connie Takamine, Treasurer, United Methodist Women's Division. "We see first hand the ravages of the AIDS pandemic. We know affordable drugs could save millions of lives."

Click here to view resolution