AFRO-NETS> WHO backs use of 3-drug AIDS pill

[Claudio Schuftan <aviva@netnam.vn>]

WHO backs use of 3-drug AIDS pill
---------------------------------
 
Inexpensive medicine can prolong lives of patients
http://www.aegis.org/news/sc/2003/SC031201.html
 
Livingstone, Zambia -- The chief of the World Health Organiza-
tion for the first time endorsed the widespread use of a new 
AIDS medicine that combines into a single pill three different 
anti-viral drugs that can prolong the lives of infected patients 
for between $150 and $300 a year.
 
The endorsement Monday by Dr. Lee Jong-wook, director general of 
the WHO, in ceremonies here marking World AIDS Day is controver-
sial because the low-cost, three-in-one pill violates patents 
held by Western drug companies. Lee's announcement was part of a 
formal roll-out of the WHO's "3 by 5" initiative, which has set 
the audacious goal of bringing AIDS drugs to 3 million people in 
low-income nations by 2005. The WHO estimates that the goal can 
be met by raising $5.5 billion for the 2-year period ending in 
2005.
 
"Now that we know what is needed, our task is to make it hap-
pen," Lee told an audience of citizens and dignitaries in Liv-
ingstone, a tourist town at the edge of Victoria Falls. Lee is 
here as part of an 80-member delegation to Africa led by Health 
and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson.
 
The AIDS drug, manufactured by maverick Indian drug maker Cipla, 
combines in a pill's three layers generic versions of the pat-
ented anti-viral medications 3tc, D4t and nevirapine. In the 
United States and Europe, the three drugs are produced by three 
different pharmaceutical giants, and would cost about $12,000 a 
year. Cipla is ignoring the patents held by GlaxoSmithKline, 
producer of 3tc; Bristol-Myers Squibb, which makes D4t, and Boe-
hringer Ingleheim, maker of nevirapine. The major drug companies 
have offered to supply their brand-name products at a fraction 
of their cost in the developed world, but the generic Cipla 
product is between a half to a third of even that discounted 
price. The Cipla drug could bring the price of AIDS treatment in 
poor countries to less than 50 cents a day. In addition to its 
low cost, the Cipla combination pill needs to be taken just once 
in the morning and once in the afternoon; some other multi-drug 
regimens require that dozens of pills be taken throughout the 
day.
 
The energetic, Korean-born WHO leader does not always see eye-
to-eye with United States policy makers. He scoffed at the no-
tion, popular in the Bush administration, that there is inade-
quate infrastructure in the developing world to handle the rapid 
scale-up of cheap anti-viral drug delivery.
 
"If we wait for the infrastructure to grow, it will never grow," 
he said. "In an African village, if they know a drug will help 
their sister or their sons live, then the will create an infra-
structure in no time." 

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