High-price AIDS Drugs Costing Lives

The high cost of drugs needed to treat AIDS patients is putting the lives of thousands at risk, the medical humanitarian organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said on Monday.

“Patients needing new drug regimens will return to AIDS death row”, MSF warned in a statement released at the 2009 International AIDS Society conference in Cape Town.

It pointed out that, “To stop spiralling costs, countries will have to routinely use measures such as compulsory licenses, which allow the generic manufacture of drugs under patent to ensure affordable treatments.”

The organisation called on drug companies to submit their AIDS drug patents to a “patent pool”, set up by the international drug financing agency UNITAID.

MSF said the patent pool would provide generic producers or researchers with drug licenses in exchange for a fee paid to the originator company.

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