UN plans push on anti AIDS drugs
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UN Secretary-General Annan to Announce New Reduced-Cost AIDS Drug
Campaign
In a private video conference meeting on Wednesday, U.N. Secretary-
General Kofi Annan and senior officials from the United Nations and
the World Bank agreed to launch a new campaign to "push" pharmaceuti-
cal companies to lower the prices of AIDS drugs in developing coun-
tries and "convince wealthy nations to pony up the cost of treating
the killer disease and its relentless spread," the Wall Street Jour-
nal reports.
The meeting comes in advance of a "major" U.N. General Assembly sum-
mit in June that will focus on AIDS. Annan was responding to "dra-
matic recent developments," such as Indian generic drug manufacturer
Cipla Ltd.'s offer to supply a triple-drug combination HIV therapy at
an annual price of US$ 600 per patient, a price "about 40%" less than
the offer made by five pharmaceutical companies last May. Cipla's of-
fer "revolutionizes the situation," according to Mark Malloch Brown,
head of the U.N. Development Program, because officials believe they
can use the offer to "pressur[e]" the big drug companies to "match or
beat" Cipla's price. "We get signals ... that the companies are con-
sidering going considerably lower. I will be amazed if we don't see
big shifts not only in prices, but also in the resources available to
buy these drugs," David Nabarro, executive director in the office of
World Health Organization Director-General Gro Harlem Brundtland,
said.
UNAIDS contacted Cipla about its offer but was told the company "pre-
ferred to deal with individual countries." The pharmaceutical compa-
nies, however, say that price is not the "only barrier to providing
medicine." GlaxoSmithKline's South Africa manager said that the com-
pany has yet to hear from the government about two separate offers it
made last summer to sell the drug Combivir for US$ 2 a day, an 80%
discount.
The health ministers of South Africa and several other sub-Saharan
African nations have invited the five major drug companies to a meet-
ing to discuss prices later this month. Intellectual property rights
were a "major" topic at Wednesday's meeting, where officials debated
"how exactly to handle offers to sell discounted drugs by manufactur-
ers of generic drugs." The major drug companies say the generic mak-
ers are "pirates profiting off their research." Meeting participants
voiced "concern" over how to protect intellectual property, although
they agreed that "any use of generic drugs must fall within current
patent law."
The Money Tree
As drug prices are expected to drop, the attention of the debate will
"shift ... to pressuring wealthy nations to fund the drugs' cost,"
according to Malloch Brown. Many African nations have per capita
health budgets of "as little as US$ 10 per year," Dr. Peter Piot,
UNAIDS director, said, excluding them from even Cipla's low price. He
added that an additional US$ 7 billion to US$ 10 billion in funding
is needed to combat the disease on a global scale. He plans to ad-
dress funding issues today at a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State
Colin Powell. Italy is seeking to "convince" the member nations of
the Group of Seven to establish an AIDS fund, and Great Britain re-
cently announced its willingness to establish a similar fund.
(Phillips/Schoofs, Wall Street Journal, 3/2).
--
Claudio Schuftan
mailto:aviva@netnam.vn
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