GENEVA, Nov 29, 2006 (AFP) - International institutions need to "get serious" about cutting the cost of essential but expensive newer HIV/AIDS medicines otherwise treatment programmes in poor countries will court collapse, the charity Medecins Sans Frontieres said Wednesday.
"It's clear as day that at current prices, the cost of accessing newer drugs will bankrupt treatment programmes, but governments, industry, and multilateral agencies are doing far too little to address the issue," said Tido von Schoen-Angerer, head of the MSF (Doctors Without Borders) campaign for access to essential medicines.
"Treatment programmes will fail unless a continual supply of generic versions of newer medicines is also guaranteed," he added in a statement ahead of World AIDS Day on Friday.
Generics are cheaper legal copies of medicines whose patent protection has either expired or been waived by the inventor or manufacturer.
In some instances, international agreements allow hard-hit poor countries to waive patent protection and force imports or production of generics from other suppliers for local use. However, few have used those measures.
MSF said World Health Organisation treatment guidelines released five months ago recommending the use of newer and more effective life-saving medicines in poor countries were largely useless without measures to help them get the drugs.
It said that life-prolonging anti-retrovirals were about six to 50 times more expensive than traditional treatments.
Newer anti-retrovirals however are also regarded as essential for patients who develop drug resistance and risk becoming sick again and dying.
MSF said data from its long-running treatment programme in South Africa shows that 17 percent of people who have been on treatment for five years have had to switch to second-line therapy.
In Malawi, where MSF has 11,000 people on AIDS treatment, about 1,600 people will need to switch to newer drug combinations in three years, which will take up to 70 percent of the entire treatment budget, the medical charity said.
The charity insisted that wider availability of generics since 2000 helped bring down prices of traditional AIDS drugs by 99 percent, from 10,000 dollars to roughly 130 dollars per patient per year.
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