United Nations Wire Alert

Wednesday, May 10, 2000

5 Firms May Cut HIV Drug Prices for Poor States

By Reuters

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Five large pharmaceutical firms have agreed for the first time to discuss with the United Nations sharply reduced prices for HIV drugs for developing nations, especially in Africa, U.N. sources said Thursday.

The five companies include two American firms, Merck & Co Inc. and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. The others are Glaxo-Wellcome PLC of Britain, privately held Boehringer Ingelheim of Germany and Roche Holding AG, a unit of F. Hoffmann-LaRoche of Switzerland.

The deal, to be announced in Geneva Thursday, is a major move toward making the drugs affordable for millions of people at prices lower than in the West and even beneath those now available at reduces rates to African nations.

The agreement was a result of negotiations with UNAIDS, the world body's coordinating agency to combat the disease, along with heads of three other U.N. agencies: the World Health Organization or WHO, the U.N. Children's Fund, UNICEF, and the U.N. Population Fund, UNFPA.

AIDS is now the leading killer in sub-Saharan Africa, where 23.3 million people have HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. With only one-tenth of the world's population, the region has two-thirds of the world's HIV-positive cases, the United Nations said.

In some countries, as many as one in every four people are thought to carry the HIV virus, many of them below the age of 25.

In 1999, the U.N. General Assembly set a target to reduce new infections by 25 percent in 15- to 24-year-olds in the most affected countries by 2005. The 15-member Security Council declared AIDS an issue affecting peace and security. The United States this month made it a national security matter.

AIDS activists in the United States and Europe for years have campaigned for medicines against the pandemic in the developing world, angry at policies that price medicines beyond the reach of the poor.

The Clinton administration Wednesday promised that U.S. officials would not stand in the way of countries seeking to obtain less costly AIDS medication for their poorest citizens as long as the measures complied with international trade rules.

The United States had placed South Africa on a ``watch list'' of countries that could face trade sanctions for threatening intellectual property of U.S. pharmaceutical companies.