NEW YORK, Oct 23 (AFP) - Former US president Bill Clinton announced Thursday a deal with four generic-drug companies to slash the price of AIDS drugs in parts of the developing world.
The agreement with three Indian pharmaceutical firms and a South African company will cut the price of a commonly used triple-drug regimen by almost a third, to about 38 cents a day per patient.
The same regime using patented drugs currently costs around 1.54 dollars, and 55 cents for generic drugs.
The deal was brokered by the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative which worked extensively with the four firms -- Ranbaxy Laboratories, Cipla and Matrix Laboratories of India, and South Africa's Aspen Pharmacare Holdings -- to find ways of bringing costs down.
"This agreement will allow the delivery of life-saving medicines to people who desperately need them," Clinton said.
"It represents a big breakthrough in our efforts to begin treatment programs in places where, until now, there has been virtually no medicine, and therefore no hope," he told reporters.
The agreement covers the delivery of the cheaper drugs to those countries where the Clinton Foundation is working with governments and organisations to set up national care, treatment and prevention programmes.
They include nine countries in the Caribbean and the African nations of Mozambique, Rwanda, South Africa and Tanzania.
Funding for the AIDS programmes in those countries has been secured, in part, by lobbying developed nations, some of which, like Ireland and Canada, have already pledged tens of millions of dollars.
"The crisis of AIDS in the developing world requires an emergency response from the global community," Clinton said. "I applaud these manufacturers for doing the right thing."
The foundation estimates that between five and six million people living with AIDS worldwide currently need treatment to save their lives, and with more than 40 million infected with HIV that number is expected to rise substantially over the next few years.
Only about 300,000 people in the developing world are receiving anti-retroviral drugs -- more than one third of them in Brazil. Of the four million AIDS sufferers in sub-Sahran Africa, only 50,000 are receiving required treatment.
One early reaction to Clinton's announcement came from Irish rock superstar Bono, a high-profile AIDS activist in his own right.
"This marks a crucial breakthrough in the AIDS emergency, showing that we can, and must, wage a successful war against this preventative and treatable disease" Bono said in a statement.
"Now what we need is money on a scale that matches the scale of the crisis. We are waiting to see what the US Congress and other rich countries will do to provide the cash," he added.
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