New York Times - December 1, 2006
Celia W. Dugger

The other countries -- Brazil, Britain, Norway and Chile -- are putting up $35 million to buy antiretroviral drugs and diagnostic tests to treat 100,000 more children in 40 nations next year. Most of the money was raised through taxes on airline tickets, a dedicated revenue source suited to ensuring the lifelong treatment of children with AIDS.

The Clinton Foundation, which has established a record of lowering AIDS drug prices in recent years, negotiated on the countries' behalf, using their pooled purchasing power to get volume discounts on the drugs. The announcement came one day before World AIDS Day.

The countries formed a new Geneva-based organization called UNITAID earlier this year to buy AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria drugs.

About 80,000 of the 660,000 children with AIDS who need treatment get it, the U.N. AIDS agency estimates, and half the children who do not get the drugs die by the time they turn 2 years old. The U.N. Children's Fund, or UNICEF, has described children as the invisible face of the AIDS pandemic because they are so much less likely than adults to get life-saving medicines.

"Providing drugs of this quality at these prices makes it even easier to scale up treatment," said Peter McDermott, who runs UNICEF's AIDS program. "UNICEF is extremely excited by this."

In addition to the UNITAID money to buy the drugs, the Clinton Foundation has raised $15 million to train doctors, upgrade pediatric wards and provide other assistance that the countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean will need to treat the additional 100,000 children next year.

Cipla and Ranbaxy Laboratories, both Indian generic-drug manufacturers, will be providing pills that combine three antiretroviral drugs into a single tablet -- a formulation that is easier to transport, store and use than multiple pills and syrups. The combination tablets also need no refrigeration, an important advantage in countries lacking electricity, and can be dissolved in water for babies and infants too young to swallow pills.

Sandeep Juneja, the HIV project head for Ranbaxy, said in a telephone interview that the company was able to provide the lower prices because of the larger volume of sales and because the Clinton Foundation, which is buying on UNITAID's behalf, would consolidate many small purchases. He explained that the market for pediatric AIDS drugs is relatively small, fragmented and spread thinly across many countries.

"It would be a nightmare handling those small orders," he said. "Imagine 40 to 60 countries buying a few hundred bottles individually, with no way to predict how many bottles would be needed."

The new prices for 19 pediatric AIDS drugs are on average 45 percent less than the lowest rates offered to poor countries in Doctors Without Borders' listing of AIDS drug prices, and more than 60 percent lower than the prices the World Health Organization reported were actually paid by developing countries, the foundation said.

Clinton announced the price reductions on Thursday at a children's hospital in New Delhi with Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the Congress Party, which is the chief member of India's coalition government. India is among the nation's benefiting from UNITAID's contributions.

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