Cut-price Drugs Offer Hope to Millions

The World Health Organisation yesterday predicted that Aids drug prices will drop to levels once thought impossibly low, as it rolled out its new strategy to get treatment to three million in the developing world by 2005.

The cost of Aids treatment in affluent countries where pharmaceutical companies have patents on their medicines is more than $10,000 (£5,800) a year.

Copies made by generics companies in India where the same patent rules do not apply are now being sold to African nations for around $300 a year. Launching the WHO plan in Nairobi, assistant secretary-general Jack Chow said: "We expect it to fall to less than half of that by the end of 2005. That is about a dollar a day at present, falling to 50 cents a day or less. In a world that spends billions of dollars on cosmetics, it is not a great deal of money."

As the plan was revealed on World Aids Day, the Indian government surprised many by becoming the latest nation to promise free drugs for 100,000 of its 4.6 million citizens infected with HIV and who will die of Aids without treatment.

The drugs will be bought at a specially negotiated low rate from Indian generics companies and made available at district hospitals in the six worst-affected states. There have been concerns that the pandemic could run out of control in India, whose government last year rejected a US estimate that the numbers could rise to 25 million by 2010.

The prices of Aids drugs have tumbled, thanks to grassroots activists in South Africa and elsewhere demanding drugs to keep people with HIV alive. The pharmaceutical companies came under pressure to drop prices and stop trying to block the generics companies from, as they see it, stealing their inventions and making cheaper copies.

But although prices are now low, Médecins sans Frontiéres, which has pioneered drug treatment for Aids in Africa, says they should come down further still.

"WHO's drug price targets lack ambition and do not reflect prices that are currently available," MSF's president Morgan Rostrup said. "Today, drug prices have fallen another 50%. WHO should encourage this trend so universal access to Aids treatment becomes a reality."

Dr Chow pointed out that 8,000 people are dying every day from HIV/Aids. "In two short decades, HIV/Aids has become the premier disease of mass destruction," he said.

Thousands of activists joined marches and a rally in Nairobi yesterday to show support for people infected with HIV and to demand access to essential drugs.

The US health secretary, Tommy Thompson, also chairman of the UN's Global Fund for Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which gives grants to poor countries for treatment programmes, flew to Zambia to show a group of business people the reality of Aids. "This war has caused more casualties than any other war," he said.

"We need America, the EU and everybody. Nobody is going to be spared unless we all come together in the fight against this disease."

In the UK, development secretary Hilary Benn launched a call for action on HIV/Aids, to spur the international community on to greater efforts against the pandemic. The UK government wants stronger political direction, better funding and better coordination by donor governments.

Mr Benn announced he was doubling the UK's contribution to UNAIDS from £3m to £6m, but made no mention of any new money for the Global Fund.

So far the UK has given $280m, but over seven years. Although the UK is the second largest bilateral donor, critics would like to see money directed to the treatment plans drawn up by developing countries, rather than to the UK's priorities.

"Action for Southern Africa (ACTSA) welcomes the promise of greater international leadership from our government in tackling HIV/Aids globally," said Aditi Sharma, ACTSA's campaigns director. But it was disappointed Mr Benn did not follow up his commitment last week to back drug treatment with money for the fund.

Disease without boundaries

In China, health workers took to the streets of Beijing to teach prevention in a country whose leaders have promised an aggressive fight against the disease. Citing a new survey by China's health ministry, the World Health Organisation and UNAIDS, the China Daily newspaper said 840,000 people in China were HIV-positive and 80,000 had Aids. China, often criticised for its slow response to health issues, has aired its first official TV condom advert and the government has promised free anti-retroviral drugs.

The Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, shook hands and chatted with three Aids patients at a Beijing hospital.

"You must have confidence. All of society cares about you," he told them. "Our whole society must be filled with an atmosphere of care and love and helpfulness. We need care and love, equality and opposition to prejudice."

In Japan, thousands of condoms were handed out in front of Shinjuku station near one of Tokyo's most notorious red-light districts, as former porn star Ai Iijima addressed the crowd about safe sex.

In Cambodia, the worst Aids-affected country in Asia, 3,000 students and activists in white and red T-shirts paraded through Phnom Penh.

In Russia, Aids specialist Vadim Pokrovsky estimated that the infection rate could be six times higher than the official figure of 257,000.

In Singapore, women in mini-skirts and tight tops handed out free condoms on the wealthy island state, where HIV infections rose 7% in the first 10 months of 2003.

In Albania, which has registered just 116 cases since 1993, scores of high school students marched through Tirana, carrying a banner that read: 'Protect Yourself and Others'.

In Bosnia, which has recorded only 64 Aids cases since 1986, the deputy foreign minister, Lidija Topic, said the country still "needs to undertake various measures in battling this disease".

At the Vatican, Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan called on people to "practice the virtue of chastity in a pan-sexualist society". He added that health campaigns should not "foster immoral and hedonistic lifestyles and behaviour, favouring the spread of the evil".