OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Thursday
SOUTH Africa and other poor countries are being frustrated by pharmaceutical companies’ delays in announcing what price cuts they are prepared to offer on anti-Aids drugs, says Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.
“We are just wallowing in a sea of uncertainty not knowing what the pharmaceutical companies are offering, and this is quite frustrating,” she told a media briefing in parliament.
Five major pharmaceutical companies promised last year to slash the price of anti-retroviral drugs to developing countries, but the minister said “to date no figure has been put before us to say this is what we will bring the price down to.”
Tshabalala-Msimang added that South African health services also faced problems in distributing the relatively cheap Aids drug Nevirapine.
She said in addition the government had to take account of “issues of resistance” to the drug and the fact that Nevirapine had not yet been registered for wide-scale use in South Africa.
The South African government has been sharply criticised for its refusal to make anti-retroviral drugs available to all 4.2 million people who are HIV-positive, according to government statistics.
But the minister said it was unfair to charge that the government was not giving Aids sufferers treatment because hospitals around the country were treating effects of the disease such as diarrhoea and thrush.
“Just because you have no anti-retrovirals in the country does not mean you are not treating people,” she said.
Tshabalala-Msimang said she expected major pharmaceutical company Pfizer to start supplying the drug Flucanozole at reduced cost soon to treat Aids complications.
The minister also said she would before the end of March release the report of President Thabo Mbeki’s controversial advisory panel on Aids, which consisted almost in equal parts of mainstream scientists and dissidents who deny the link between HIV and Aids.
The report is “ready” but has been sent back to the authors to correct “some untidiness on issues of a non-scientific nature”, she said, without elaborating. – AFP
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