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The issue of affordable drug access is likely to revolutionise the pharmaceutical industry. Against a backdrop of soaring profits, people are asking whether those hugely successful companies justify the cost of their pills, which are often priced too high for the neediest patients.

In an Aids clinic in South Africa, Nigel meets health workers as they discuss the problems their patients are experiencing as they adjust to life-saving antiretroviral treatment. The pills are not easy to take but most of them realise they are lucky to be receiving them. Across southern Africa there are hundreds of thousands of people who need these drugs.

Patients before profits?

Cheap copies of these expensive pills are now on sale at a fraction of the price the big pharmaceutical companies charge people in other countries. Now patients in the west are demanding to know why their drugs cost so much. In the United States many people buy their medication across the border from Canada, where the costs are much lower.

Nigel asks the pharmaceutical companies whether it is time for them to be more realistic about their business dealings, and whether they put patients before profits.

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