MELBOURNE, Australia, Oct 6 (AFP) - Developing countries will be faced with a drugs bill that could reach five billion US dollars next year to combat the rise of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, an AIDS conference here was told Saturday.
"The prices of antiretroviral drugs represent a major factor for the lack of access to therapy in developing countries," Professor Stefano Vella, president of the International AIDS Society, told the opening session of the Sixth International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific.
"Meeting the cost of the HIV/AIDS epidemic will be the most challenging imperative of this century," he said.
"This cost should be met by the wealthy countries," he added.
He said the increasing availability of generic drugs and the willingness of drug companies to make drugs available on a "no-profit" basis was reducing the cost of treatment.
Antiretroviral treatment had been scaled down to perhaps 150 dollars a year per patient, with the use of generic medicines, produced largely by Indian companies.
But Vella said this was still beyond the reach of most people with HIV/AIDS in developing countries.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has proposed an annual 7-10 billion Global AIDS and Health Fund to fight AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, with the larger share earmarked for HIV/AIDS.
But at its July summit in Genoa, the Group of Eight (G8) came up with only 1.3 billion dollars to fund the war on AIDS.
India will have the biggest drugs bill in Asia with the number of people infected with HIV rising to 3.9 million, according to a report published by Monitoring the AIDS Pandemic (MAP), an international network of HIV experts.
India now has more people with HIV than any country except South Africa, which has 4.7 million people infected with HIV.
But because of India's vast population, the overall rate of HIV prevalence is low. Its HIV infection rate represents 0.75 per cent of the adult population.
Since 1988, HIV/AIDS has been detected in every Indian state. The predominant means of transmission is heterosexual contact (80.9 per cent), blood transfusion (5.5 per cent), and drug injecting (5.3 per cent).
But the epidemic varies widely from region to region.
More than one percent of pregnant women are HIV positive in the southern states of Mararashtra, Tamil Nadu and Manipur.
HIV infection among pregnant women is used as an indicator of HIV levels in the general population.
Some of the factors contributing to the spread of HIV include migration of labour, low literacy levels leading to low awareness of HIV, gender inequality and prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases, the report said.
Some 89 percent of those infected are 15-44 years old, and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) estimated 350,000 people died of AIDS-related illnesses last year in India.
It predicted the death rate will rise to 500,000 by 2005, caused mainly by tuberculosis.
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