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LATIN AMERICA: Universal Access to AIDS Drugs Possible With Agreed Price Cuts

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Aug 5 2005 (IPS) - Latin America’s health ministers negotiating as a bloc with representatives of the pharmaceutical industry secured reductions of up to 66 percent on the prices of HIV/AIDS drugs.

The agreement reached at the second round of joint negotiations, which ended Friday in the Argentine capital, will make it possible to provide antiretroviral drugs to 100 percent of those living with HIV/AIDS in Latin America, up from the 73 percent who are currently receiving treatment, said officials.

“The industry has committed itself to price cuts and uniform prices, which will enable us to achieve universal access to treatment in Latin America by year-end,” Brazilian medical doctor Jorge Bermúdez, head of the Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO) Essential Medicines, Vaccines and Health Technologies Unit, told IPS.

Civil society organisations taking part in the meeting were pleased with the results, although they pointed out that the commitments assumed on paper must now be put into practice in each country. The price agreement will initially be in force for two years.

“This is very important because the laboratories have accepted uniform prices for the entire region, independently of the volume of purchases made by each country,” Dr. Mabel Bianco, director of the Foundation for Women’s Studies and Research, commented to IPS.

The Foundation forms part of a network of regional organisations working on behalf of people living with HIV/AIDS.

Bianco headed Argentina’s National AIDS Programme in 2000 and 2001. “As director, I could not obtain the same prices as Brazil, because it purchases much larger quantities,” she said.

Taking part in the negotiations were representatives of 26 pharmaceutical companies and health ministers or other officials from 11 countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Some of the companies specified which pharmaceutical products they would agree to cut the prices of and which they would not.

U.S.-based Abbott Laboratories, producers of the antiretroviral drug Kaletra, have committed to reducing their prices, but did not sign the agreement, Bermúdez told IPS.

Abbott has been in negotiations for several months with the Brazilian government, which has threatened to break the patent on Kaletra and begin manufacturing its own generic version if the company does not agree to a substantial price cut.

The price reductions negotiated range from 15 to 66 percent, depending on the product. But these cuts are highly significant for small countries where prices were extremely steep and governments had no negotiating power.

The cost in dollars of antiretroviral drug therapy will now be slashed by an average of 45 percent in Bolivia, 48 percent in Uruguay, 52 percent in Ecuador, 56 percent in Chile, and 66 percent in Paraguay.

According to PAHO statistics, there are 1.5 million people living with HIV in Latin America, and 358,000 of them need drug treatment, but only 275,000 currently receive it. With the new price cuts, it should be possible for treatment to be extended to all of those who need it.

Latin America is already the region with the highest coverage of antiretroviral therapy in the developing world.

Antiretroviral drugs slow down the reproduction of HIV – the virus that causes AIDS – and can thus significantly lengthen the life span of patients and improve their quality of life.

But they are currently available to around 400,000 people in the developing world, which is home to roughly 95 percent of the total 40 million people living with HIV/AIDS globally.

In 1996, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay adopted policies to provide anti-HIV drugs free of charge to all those who need them. Other nations in the region have adopted similar measures over recent years.

Drug therapy requires patients to be tested regularly to monitor their viral load, a procedure that is made extremely costly by the high cost of the reagents used.

“The goal of the 11 countries that participated in this round of negotiations is to eliminate one of the main obstacles to universal access to treatment, which is the high price of antiretroviral drugs,” the health ministers stated in a final communiqué.

With that aim, they first began to negotiate regional price cuts in Lima, Peru in 2003.

Dr. Bianco remarked that the region’s officials and organisations “have learned a lot” since then and achieved far better results in this second round of negotiations, where they even managed to obtain uniform prices, a condition that the laboratories refused to accept in Lima.