The South African government has no intention of buying the antiretroviral drugs that can keep people with HIV/Aids alive in spite of its courtroom victory over pharmaceutical companies that were trying to block the import of cheap medicines, says its health minister, reports Sarah Boseley. [...] An Indian company, Cipla, which makes copycat versions of the antiretrovirals, has offered a three-drug cocktail for $250 (£178) a year per person which would be $10 000 a year in the west, but her government cannot afford it, she says. "It is $250 times millions of people times the infrastructure that we do not have times the health workers who are not yet trained times prevention measures," [South African health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang] said.
Well .... in a way, I can't say I blame them. Even assuming that you could get the drugs to all the people in South Africa who need it, it would cost something like $2.5 billion per year, in a country with government revenues of $30 billion (and government expenditures of $38 billion, which is not going to be sustainable over any length of time, given the South African economy).
That said ... one of the reasons the government gives for not giving out anti-retrovirals is that they don't have a distribution network in place. Yet they're planning to use this legal position to distribute drugs to fight the secondary infections, TB and the like. If you can't distribute one set of drugs, how can you distribute the other? If you complain that you don't have the trained staff to distribute the anti-retrovirals, how can you have the staff to distribute drugs to combat TB, which has a treatment regimen equally as complex?
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
[Archives: 2001 and after]
Archives before February 5, 2001
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12/19/2001: vive la france
12/19/2001: princess, redux
12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld
12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
12/18/2001: interesting donation
12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed
12/18/2001: saudi princess
12/17/2001: new resolve
12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right
12/17/2001: polluters ho!