"Drug companies should give up their patent rights to HIV medicines to help prevent the deaths of millions of people in poor countries, a British government minister will say this week.
"The international development minister, Mike Foster, will call on pharmaceutical companies to put lives before profits, as the all-party parliamentary group on Aids publishes a report this week detailing the scale of the "treatment timebomb". By 2030, they estimate, 50 million people will need new drugs, which are currently prohibitively expensive, to keep them alive.
"Three million people are on cheap, basic HIV drug combinations, but they are only a third of those in need and resistance is growing to these drugs both in the developing world and in the west.
"New and improved drugs are urgently required, but they are expensive, and cheap generic copies of the newest drugs can no longer easily be made and sold because of tightened intellectual property rules in India and China. ...
"According to the all-party report, if HIV patents are put in a pool, generics companies – which make the cheap combinations now used in Africa – will be permitted to make low-cost copies of newer drugs and devise new combinations in a single pill, which is important for people living in poverty.
"The report lays out in stark terms the coming crisis. "It took political activism almost a decade ago to make life-saving drugs available to the poor in developing countries," it says. "Only a third of those who need it are on treatment and this treatment will not work for them forever. Political activism is needed once more to ensure that the next generation of drugs is available to the world's poorest in future."
"MP David Barrow, who chairs the group, said: "We are sitting on a treatment timebomb. We must reduce the price of second-line medicines and less toxic first-line medicines before millions need them. We cannot sleepwalk into a situation where we can only afford to treat a tiny proportion of those infected."
Read more in Guardian.co.uk, July 12, 2009.
Also see Aidsmap, http://www.aidsmap.com/en/news/2505E3FE-AAEC-4E01-B4CE-EE81F6F304A3.asp
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