Wall Street Journal - April 5, 2001
Rachel Zimmerman, Staff Reporter of the Wall Street Journal

The price tag for treating even one million people suffering from AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa would run to $1.12 billion a year for three years, according to a statement released Wednesday by faculty members of Harvard University. Currently, 25 million people are infected with HIV in the region.

The 32-page statement, which includes a proposal for financing the treatment and prevention of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, calls for establishing a global trust fund to shoulder the staggering expense. The cost of treatment, more than $1,120 per patient per year, includes drugs as well as testing, monitoring and research. Expanding treatment to three million HIV-infected people would cost more than $3.3 billion a year, the report says. It also proposes clinical trials to determine the best practices for HIV treatment in poor countries.

Currently, three million to four million people in sub-Saharan Africa are in advanced stages of AIDS, the statement contends. Of those, only about 10,000 people have access to life-saving AIDS antiretroviral drug cocktails.

The cost of prevention programs and treatment other than antiretroviral therapy would require an additional $3 billion a year, according to estimates cited by the statement. That would bring the total annual cost to around $4.1 billion for both prevention and for treatment of one million people. If three million people in Africa were brought under treatment by the fifth year, total costs for prevention and treatment would rise to roughly $6.3 billion a year.

The statement was written by several Harvard faculty members and signed by 128 doctors, economists, policy experts and AIDS researchers affiliated with the university.

Jeffrey Sachs, director of Harvard's Center for International Development and one of the report's authors, said in a conference call announcing the statement that a comprehensive plan for treatment is overdue, particularly now that several drug companies have cut prices on their AIDS drugs in Africa. Still, Mr. Sachs said, he is asking the pharmaceutical industry to make all AIDS drugs available at cost in sub-Saharan Africa.

In addition, Mr. Sachs, a leading advocate for more aggressive intervention by wealthy countries in the African AIDS crisis, called for the U.S. to take the lead in establishing the global trust fund for AIDS treatment. Mr. Sachs said the U.S. per-capita cost for such a global trust fund could be roughly $6 to $10 a year.

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