OUAGADOUGOU, Dec 11 (AFP) - Ten African countries have signed up to deals with pharmaceutical companies that have helped slash the cost of AIDS anti-retroviral drugs by 85 percent on average, the UN programme UNAIDS said Tuesday.
The 10 are Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Mali, Morocco, Rwanda, Senegal and Uganda, it announced on the sidelines of a regional conference on AIDS in Africa.
Four other non-African signatories to the agreement are Chile, Honduras, Romania and Trinidad and Tobago.
Under the deal, called Accelerating Access, poor countries have access to cheap drugs but pledge not to sell these on to other markets, especially the rich world where pharmaceutical companies make the bulk of their profits.
A total of 72 countries "have already expressed an interest" in the Accelerating Access process, a public-private partnership launched in May 2000 by five UN agencies and the major drugs companies, World Health Organisation (WHO) coordinator Badara Samb told AFP.
"This is just the beginning. But the results so far show that significant progress can be made in accelerating access to ARVs (anti-retrovirals) in the countries that need it most," said Tomris Tuermen, executive director in charge of HIV/AIDS at the WHO.
The price has fallen from around 3,000 dollars for a year's course of treatment for one person to around 350 dollars in the best cases, AIDS workers said, adding however that for many poor African countries this was still too high.
Meanwhile, two new studies on Tuesday confirmed the stunning effectiveness of anti-retrovirals in Africa, dealing a blow to critics who claim the continent is ill-equipped to administer these powerful treatments against the AIDS virus.
The so-called "cocktail" of drugs is common in rich countries but so far only reaches 30,000 of the 28.1 million Africans with AIDS or its precursor, human immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV).
The two studies, on volunteers in Senegal and Ivory Coast, showed that volunteers who took the therapy enjoyed a massive cut in detectable levels of virus and a big rise in CD4 immune cells, and stood a far better chance of being alive, a year after starting treatment, than those who did not take the drugs.
"The results were excellent," said Eric Delaporte of France's Institute for Research in Development (IRD).
"This has demonstrated the feasibility of access to treatment in an African context as well as the effectiveness and tolerance of these drugs," Delaporte said, adding that the next stage was to widen the project to include larger numbers of volunteers.
Anti-retroviral drugs have been propelled to the top of the agenda in the worldwide AIDS crisis.
The most effective weapon against HIV, they have been found to reduce levels of the virus to, in many cases, below detectable levels, greatly prolonging the lifespan of patients who otherwise would have died within a few years.
A growing public clamour forced pharmaceutical companies this year to start slashing prices.
That process was reinforced by an agreement in principle at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks in Qatar last month under which countries with a pharmaceutical industry can manufacture cheap generics to meet a national public health crisis.
Defenders of the pharmaceutical business also say that Africa lacks the infrastructure of doctors, laboratory technicians and equipment to ensure that these vital drugs are used properly.
If the anti-retrovirals are dished out without proper supervision, that would enable HIV, a devious, fast-mutating virus, to be become resistant to them, just as hospital "superbugs" and pernicious strains of tuberculosis have become immune to powerful antibiotics.
But the two studies, together with pilot projects carried out by UNAIDS in Uganda and Ivory Coast, have backed the practicability of administering the cocktail in Africa, with close compliance by local care workers and patients and very few cases of resistance.
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