A Big Step Against HIV/AIDS

Summary: The Clinton Foundation strikes a major victory and I lay out some figures to show how we can and should stem the tide of global HIV/AIDS. We need your support.

On Tuesday, Bill Clinton announced that his foundation had negotiated significantly lowered prices for first-line drugs to less than $1 per day.

The big boost here comes in the reduction for the once-a-day pill which is the staple of first-line drugs. The pill includes tenofovir (Viread, NtRTI), lamivudine (Epivir, NARTI) and efavirenz (Sustiva, NNRTI). The new price of $339 per patient per year is expected be 45 percent lower than the current rate available to low-income countries and 67 percent less than the price available to many middle-income countries.

As of December 2006, nearly 40 million people were estimated to be living with HIV/AIDS; nearly 25 million of which reside in sub-Saharan Africa. 2.9 million people died in 2006 due to HIV/AIDS; 2.1 million of which resided in sub-Saharan Africa.

The lowered prices are the fruit of negotiated agreements with generic drug makers Cipla Ltd. and Matrix Laboratories Ltd (Interesting chemical models here) both of India. Both collaborated with the foundation to lower production costs, in part by securing lower prices for raw materials.

Prices for second-line drugs were also significantly lowered during negotiations. These drugs are essential for patients who develop resistance to first-line drugs and were previously out of financial reach even for funded projects.

Clinton said Tuesday,

"I believe in intellectual property and ensuring that manufacturers earn the profit margins they need to keep the discovery and supply of AIDS drugs sustainable. But that shouldn't prevent us from getting essential life-saving medicines to those who need them in low and middle-income countries alike"

Reading that makes me think of what Nobel Prize winning economist Muhammad Yunus wrote in his book "Banker to the Poor - Micro-lending and the Battle Against World Poverty". Yunus summarizes his view of poverty and how we ought to proceed:

"Poverty does not belong in civilized human society. Its proper place is in a museum. That's where it will be. When schoolchildren go with their teachers and tour the poverty museum, they will be horrified to see the misery and indignity of human beings. They will blame their forefathers for tolerating this inhumane condition and for allowing it to continue in such a large segment of the population until the early part of the twenty-first century.
I have always believed that the elimination of poverty from the world is a matter of will. Even today we don't pay serious attention to the issue of poverty, because the powerful remain relatively untouched by it. Most people distance themselves from the issue by saying that if the poor worked harder, they wouldn't be poor.
When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding a solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences.
The real issue is creating a level playing field for everybody - rich and poor countries, powerful and small enterprises - giving every human being a fair chance. As globalization continues to encroach on our socioeconomic realities, the creation of this level playing field can become seriously endangered unless we initiate a global debate and generally agree on the features of a "right" architecture of globalization, rather than drift into something terribly wrong in the absence of a framework for action. This framework will no doubt have many features, but we can keep in mind the following: The rule of "strongest takes it all" must be replaced by a rule that ensures everybody a place and a piece of the action. "Free trade" must mean freedom for the weakest. The poor must be made active players, rather than passive victims, in the process of globalization."

Poverty and HIV/AIDS are closely linked, but to avoid writing a thesis, I'll allow you to investigate as you wish. Instead, let's return to the fight against HIV/AIDS.

While we return, it is important to understand that treatment is only one facet of the fight. UNAIDS (widely recognized as the most accurate source of data and estimates) in their 2006 report stated that for low- and middle-income countries, the entire funding requirements for treatment in 2006 was $3B, and an estimated $12.3B for 2006-2008. Furthermore, to financially cover prevention, care and treatment, support for orphans and vulnerable children, program costs, and human resources in low- and middle-income nations (essentially all aspects of the fight) for 2006-2008 is estimated to carry a $55.1B price tag. (Chapter 10 - From here)

For a sense of how much this is, NASA has a budget of over $16B for 2007 alone. Those nearly wholly incompetent TSA agents at airports and their department have over $6B. Estimates of the cost of the Iraq war easily exceed $400B.

As a world, we can easily fund this effort many times over, and yet we don't.

It's easy to turn a blind eye to this and go on watching "Lost". I can't. You shouldn't. I implore you to phone your friends and representatives, lift your voice and together, let's put an end to the greatest global health crisis the world has ever known. Never has it been clearer stated than by International AIDS Society President Dr Joep Lange:

"If we can get cold Coca Cola and beer to every remote corner of Africa, it should not be impossible to do the same with drugs."