OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Wednesday
PHARMACEUTICAL giant Bristol-Myers Squibb on Tuesday promised a ”significant reduction” in the price of Aids drugs to South Africa’s private sector, a move hailed by activists as likely to prolong tens of thousands of lives.
BMS Aids unit manager Azima Batcha told a Cape Town seminar that an announcement on the details of the company’s offer of cheap supplies of the drugs DDI and D4T would be made ”fairly shortly”.
The company has already offered these drugs, used in ”cocktail therapy”, at a loss to the government and non-governmental organisations operating in South Africa, saying it would charge a dollar for each daily dose.
But the government, despite winning a court case in April against drug companies – allowing it to import or manufacture cheap drugs – has so far failed to take up such offers. It does not provide antiretroviral drugs on public health on the grounds that even such low prices are too costly and that toxicity and follow-up care are problems.
The cost to the private sector ”will be somewhere approaching the price (the dollar-a-day offered the government), and it will be a significant reduction,” Batcha said.
Mark Heywood, representative for the activist Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), said the company’s announcement would put pressure on other firms to follow suit.
”If these price reductions can get into the private sector you have a real possibility of having 100_000 to 200_000 people being treated within two years, based upon existing private sector infrastructure and capacity to prescribe and monitor,” he said.
Fewer than 10_000 of the 4,7-million HIV-positive South Africans – one in nine of the population – are currently being treated with antiretroviral drugs, he added.
TAC activists meanwhile demonstrated in Cape Town and threatened to sue the government for failing to implement programmes to prevent mother-to-child HIV transmission.
TAC official Promise Mthembu said the organisation would reconsider legal action against the government – which it put aside when the government announced it would go ahead with Nevirapine pilot trials to prevent mother-to-child HIV transmission – because it had failed to implement them.
Those trials had been scheduled to start in March at 18 provincial hospitals.
An estimated 100_000 babies are born HIV positive annually in South Africa after contracting the disease from their mothers. – AFP
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