Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2004. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
BBC News - Wednesday, 22 September, 2004
The firm, Cosmos, says it will sell the drugs for around half the current cost of $38 a month.
It will make patented copies of the drugs under licence from British company GlaxoSmithKline and sell them in five East African countries.
About 7% of Kenya's 30 million people are thought to have the Aids virus.
'Path-finder'
Aids was declared a national emergency in 1999.
Cosmos Managing Director Prakash Patel said the firm would start making drugs "in the next couple of weeks".
Cosmos will be allowed to manufacture zidovudine and larnivudine, or a combination of the two, for sale in Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.
Industry Minister Mukhisa Kituyi said he hoped the agreement "moves on to be an important path-finder to seek to make ARVs [anti-retrovirals] affordable to thousands, but also to resuscitate the pharmaceutical industry" in Kenya.
The government helped broker the agreement because it did not want to issue a compulsory licence, which poor nations can do for a limited time in cases of national emergency under World Trade Organization rules, Mr Kituyi said.
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