Clinton deal to get Aids drugs to world's poor 

Agencies in New York
Friday October 24, 2003
The Guardian 

The former US president Bill Clinton announced yesterday that he had secured a deal with four generic drug companies to provide low-cost Aids drugs in the developing world. 
The agreement will cut the price of a triple-drug treatment to about 38 cents (22p) a day, Mr Clinton said at a news conference at his Harlem office. 
"This agreement will allow the delivery of life-saving medicines to people who desperately need them," he said. "It represents a big breakthrough in our efforts to begin treatment programmes in places where, until now, there has been virtually no medicine, and therefore no hope." 
Aids activists hailed the deal. "For Aids treatment rates in poor countries to go up, prices have to come down," said Bono, human rights activist and lead singer of the rock band U2. 
"Today's announcement marks a crucial breakthrough in the Aids emergency." 
The William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation HIV/Aids Initiative said the plan would get cheaper drugs to about 2 million people by 2008. 
Under the deal brokered by the foundation, three Indian companies and one South African firm opened their books to a group of Clinton foundation advisers, who then worked with the companies to cut costs. 
Patented versions of the treatment cost at least $1.54 per day. 
The foundation has also helped several Caribbean and African countries to prepare detailed plans for introducing the drugs. The plans are intended to make the drugs more readily available throughout each country. 
In Geneva, the World Health Organisation welcomed the Clinton initiative and all efforts to reduce the price of Aids medicines and make them available to those in need. 
"Providing Aids treatment to those who most urgently need it in poor countries is the most urgent health challenge the world faces," the WHO director-general, Dr Lee Jong-wook, said in a statement. 
The WHO and its partners are committed to delivering anti-retroviral therapy to 3 million people in developing countries by the end of 2005, the UN health agency said. 
To pay for the drugs and for improvements in the countries' health systems, Mr Clinton has secured partial funding by lobbying wealthy states including Ireland and Canada. 
Ireland has committed $58.3m over five years, mainly to Mozambique. 
"Usually I just call the prime minister or the president", Mr Clinton told the press conference, "and tell them what we're doing and ask them to have somebody look at it. 
"And I always tell them that even though we're friends they don't have to do this for me - don't do it unless they think it's a good thing." 
Mr Clinton's foundation has been working with the governments of Rwanda, Mozambique, Tanzania and several Caribbean countries to fund Aids treatment. 

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/aids/story/0,7369,1070075,00.html]