OUAGADOUGOU, April 24 (AFP) - India's Chemical Industrial Pharmaceutical Laboratories (CIPLA) is to supply Burkina Faso with generic anti-retroviral medicines, enabling the west African country to slash by half the cost of treatment for sufferers of AIDS, medical sources told AFP Thursday.
Burkina's health ministry signed an accord Tuesday with CIPLA, under which the Indian firm will supply generic anti-retrovirals at a cost of 61 euros (67 dollars) a month versus more than 120 euros using identical branded medication.
Anti-retroviral drugs are seen as a highly effective weapon against HIV. They have been found to reduce levels of the virus that causes AIDS to, in many cases, below detectable levels, greatly prolonging the lifespan of patients who otherwise would have died within a few years.
Generic anti-AIDS medications will be available soon in Burkina and "are expected to give around 50,000 AIDS-infected people, or around 15 percent of the country's HIV-positive population, access to this type of treatment," said Lazare Banse, director of the agency in charge of buying the retrovirals.
At present, only 675 AIDS sufferers can afford anti-retroviral treatment in Burkina, where more than seven percent of the population of 12.6 million, or around 886,000 people are HIV-positive.
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