AIDS Drug Costs Must Fall in Poor Nations

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 21 (Reuters) - Drug companies and governments must do more to bring down the cost of AIDS therapies so that patients in poor nations can gain access to treatment, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on Tuesday.

While effective drugs against AIDS and related infections are available and softening the disease's impact in wealthy nations, "access to these treatments is uneven, and people in developing countries are dying needlessly for lack of appropriate care," Annan said.

In a report to the UN General Assembly, he said the inequities must be addressed "through all possible means."

Possible strategies include increasing competition between suppliers, having drug firms license their products to other companies that could make them at a lower price, adopting varying pricing scales for different markets, procuring drugs on a regional basis and switching to lower-cost generic drugs, his report said.

Annan submitted the report as part of the preparations for a special session on AIDS of the 189-nation General Assembly, to be held in New York June 25-27.

The special session was scheduled after the General Assembly last September adopted its millennium declaration, pledging to begin shrinking the number of new cases of AIDS each year by 2015.

The goal of the special session is to agree on a global program of stepped-up national, regional and international efforts to combat the epidemic.

Annan's report singled out for praise Brazil, Latin America's most populous country and the country with the region's highest rate of infection with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Nonetheless, because of aggressive Brazilian government efforts to bring down drug costs, "the number of AIDS cases, especially the number of AIDS-related deaths, has significantly decreased as a result of widespread access to life-prolonging treatments," the report said.

"Although these programs are not yet available to all that need them, they provide an important model for expansion. With international support, more developing countries are developing strategic plans that place access to care at the heart of their national responses to HIV/AIDS," the report said.

"While medical care in high-income countries is significantly extending the lives of people living with HIV, the challenge now is to improve access to care in developing countries, where 95 percent of the world's 36.1 million HIV-infected people live," the report said.

According to UNAIDS, the United Nations' anti-AIDS umbrella group, some 36.1 million people around the world were infected with HIV as of the end of last year. About 5.3 million people were newly infected during the year 2000 while 3 million died from the disease that year, according to UNAIDS.

Africa, where AIDS is today the No. 1 cause of death, remains the hardest hit region, home to 70% of the world's HIV-infected adults and 80% of its infected children.