Nigeria reaches deal with Indian firm to buy AIDS drugs

[Guest guest]

Nigeria reaches deal with Indian firm to buy AIDS

drugs

By Donnelly, Globe Staff, 4/26/2001

BUJA, Nigeria - In the first substantial purchase of

AIDS cocktails by an African nation, Nigeria will announce

a deal today with the Indian generic drug maker Cipla to

buy enough drugs to treat 10,000 people a year.

Cipla officials, attending a summit on AIDS and other infectious

diseases, told the Globe that the company agreed to reduce the

price of a three-drug combination to $350 for Nigeria, lowering its

previous $600 offer for low-income countries. Nigerian officials

confirmed the terms of the agreement.

While the $3.5 million deal for Nigeria is just a small step toward

addressing treatment for an estimated 2.6 million Nigerians infected

with the human immunodeficiency virus, it sends a strong message to

Western donors that African countries will foot part of the cost of

trying to control the pandemic.

It also gives the first sliver of hope for some Africans living with

the disease that antiretroviral drugs readily available in the West

since 1995 will no longer be denied them for financial reasons.

Cipla officials revealed yesterday that they are negotiating

AIDS-drugs deals with Cameroon, Ivory Coast, and Algeria. Senegal

and Uganda offer small-scale treatment programs.

''If any government wants to give away the drug free to people with

AIDS, Cipla will basically sell it to them at the cost to us,''

said Jaideep A. Gogtay, Cipla's medical director. While he said that

the Bombay-based company will look at each deal country by country,

''we are prepared to make the $350 offer to other countries.''

In February, Cipla shocked public health officials and pharmaceutical

companies by announcing that it would slash the price of its generic AIDS

cocktail to $350 for Doctors Without Borders and $600 for low-income

countries. The move caused private drug companies to slash prices as well,

and for the first time some of the 25 million Africans infected with the

virus learned that they had the possibility of getting treatment.

While Doctors Without Borders just began a treatment project for 150 people

with HIV in Cambodia and hopes to begin programs in Guatemala and Thailand,

no countries had appeared to be in line to make deals with Cipla. That

raised doubts about the poor countries' commitment to fight the disease.

But for many countries, the cost still remains prohibitively high, and

vastly out of proportion to meager national health budgets that are often

under $10 per capita. Nigeria's purchase plan won immediate praise at the

AIDS conference. It will be buying the drugs stavudine, lamivudine, and

nevirapine.

''Enabling wider access to HIV care gives a lot more meaning to prevention

of AIDS,'' Nabarro, the top aide to the World Health Organization

director general, Gro Harlem Brundtland, said in an interview. ''It also

gives a lot more meaning to improving access to counseling and testing. For

years before, there has been nothing to say to HIV patients, except that if

we treat your pneumonia, you might have a few more weeks to live.''

Nabarro said that while the Nigerian deal could be viewed as a symbolic

purchase, given the depth of the problem, ''We'd love it to become real,

more widespread. The challenge now is to get the health systems to work.''

President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria told D. Sachs, the director

of the Center for International Development at Harvard University, about the

purchase during a meeting at the leader's office. Sachs immediately offered

the services of Harvard specialists to set up a delivery system.

''We could help with the training by bringing experts who have experience in

how to oversee the use of antiretroviral drugs,'' Sachs said.

Harvard's School of Public Health already has strong ties with Nigeria's

health plan. Using a $25 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates

Foundation, Harvard will study health systems in three states in Nigeria

during the next several years.

The health school's dean, Barry Bloom, also is attending the AIDS summit,

which is expected to attract 15 to 25 African heads of state and Bill

Clinton for the deliberations today and tomorrow.

Berman, coordinator of the Doctors Without Borders Access to

Essential Medicines campaign, called Nigeria's agreement with Cipla ''very

significant.'' But he said it would be vital for the country to make a

long-term commitment to purchasing the drugs as well as ''gearing up the

public sector so they can effectively administer the drugs.''

In another development at the conference, the World Health Organization

released a Boston University study that found five African countries had

reduced or abolished taxes and tariffs on insecticide-treated bed nets in

the past year. The bed nets have helped reduce mortality from malaria among

children by an average of 25 percent, according to surveys in three

countries.

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http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/116/nation/Nigeria_reaches_deal_with_Indian_fi\

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Donnelly can be reached by e-mail at jdonnelly@.... This story ran on

page 22 of the Boston Globe on 4/26/2001.