Will ARVs cost too much?
July 26, 2012
Nathan Ford, Medical Coordinator, MSF (De Capua)
As a new generation of AIDS-fighting drugs emerges, there’s fear the antiretrovirals may be too expensive for low and middle income countries. At the 19th International AIDS Conference, a medical aid group is raising concerns about prices and patents.
Doctors Without Borders, also known as MSF, treats about 220,000 people for HIV/AIDS in 23 countries. Medical Coordinator Nathan Ford said the trend for cheaper AIDS drugs has started to reverse.
“While some of the older antiretrovirals, or ARVs, have seen dramatic price reductions in the last decade, the newer medicines that are needed for patients who are failing first line therapy and second line therapy are dramatically more expensive --tenfold or even twentyfold more expensive than first line treatment,” he said
Ford said the new drugs may be widely needed in the coming years.
“There are real discussions by the World Health Organization and other expert groups about some of these newer medicines being moved earlier into the course of treatment so that patients, who are failing first line medicine already, can benefit from these newer, more powerful, less toxic drugs. So WHO and other groups are saying that these are medicines that we really want to be able to provide patients earlier in the course of treatment,” he said.
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