Ready, Fire, Aim! - Mihail's Public Blog: Reducing cost of HIV drugs in China

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Saturday, September 7, 2002

Reducing cost of HIV drugs in China

China took steps yesterday to finally face up to its rapidly growing H.I.V.-AIDS crisis, raising its estimate of the number infected to one million and saying it would manufacture a full complement of AIDS drugs if Western patent holders did not lower prices.

Earlier this year, the World Trade Organization basically granted countries the right to bypass drug patents if the medicines were declared essential to combating a national health emergency and were otherwise unaffordable.

To date, China's negotiations with drug companies have yielded only piecemeal results, bringing the price of the cocktail of expensive Western medicines used to treat AIDS from an exorbitant $8,000 a year in China to a merely unaffordable $3,000 to $4,000 — not including the testing that taking such drugs involves. The same medicines, in generic form, cost about $300 in Thailand.

As a result, Mr. Qi acknowledged, only about 100 patients in China are now on the AIDS cocktail, and most of those patients' drugs have been donated by foreign groups.

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