Bill Clinton Announces AIDS Drug Deals: Once-a-day AIDS pill for less than $1 a day

[DeepModem Mom]

WP/AP: Bill Clinton Announces AIDS Drug Deals
By KAREN MATTHEWS
The Associated Press
Tuesday, May 8, 2007

NEW YORK -- Former President Bill Clinton announced agreements with drug companies Tuesday to lower the price of so-called "second-line" AIDS drugs for people in the developing world and to make a once-a-day AIDS pill available for less than $1 a day.

The anti-retroviral drugs are needed by patients who develop resistance to first-line treatment and currently cost 10 times as much as first-line therapy, Clinton said. Nearly half a million patients will require these drugs by 2010.

Clinton's foundation negotiated agreements with generic drug makers Cipla Ltd. and Matrix Laboratories Ltd. that he said would mean an average savings of 25 percent in low-income countries and 50 percent in middle-income countries. He said the companies collaborated with the foundation to lower production costs, in part by securing lower prices for raw materials.

The reduced-price, once-daily pill combines the drugs tenofovir, lamivudine and efavirenz.

Clinton said the new price of $339 per patient per year would 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

"Seven million people in the developing world are in need of treatment for HIV/AIDS," Clinton said. "We are trying to meet that need with the best medicine available today, and at prices that low and middle-income countries can afford."...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/08/AR2007050800321.html?hpid=topnews

[BOSSHOG]

1. Big Dog doing more for the world in a part time gig

as bush fucks up everything he touches. But that is the gop plan so mission accomplished.

[xchrom]

2. great news -- and uh bush? that's how you get something done.

[bigtree]

3. saw this in an interview this morn on CNN

fantastic effort

[MannyGoldstein]

4. Wow? What Happened To the Clintons?

Mr. Clinton seems to have actually done something useful for the poor. And Mrs. Clinton actually proposed legislation that seems to be useful (reauthorization for the war).

I hope this is a permanent shift - these two are extraordinary politicians, and it would be great if they worked for the benefit of all.

[krispos42]

5. Bush Administration reply:

The Bush Adminstration is instead preaching 'abstinence-only' AIDS treatment instead.

[Lisa]

6. Stephen Lewis (the outgoing UN AIDS special envoy) gives Clinton major props for this

I attended a lecture Lewis gave last month, and he told me that this would NOT have happened without Clinton's work. He kept saying that he admires the Clinton Foundation because "they work FAST" -- they saw that something needed to be done, and instead of sitting around doing yet more studies (or worse, posing for the cameras and then putting the issue on the back burner as soon as the spotlight is off), they went out and did it. He said, "Clinton gets it".

Although many of the people affected are living on less than a dollar a day -- this turns what seemed to be an insurmountable problem into something which can be addressed, if we have the will to do so. Lewis pointed out that for people with an annual income of less than $300 per year, every penny shaved off the treatment cost is that much more important.

[DeepModem Mom]

8. Thanks for reporting this, Lisa! nt

[Grandrose]

7. Way to go Big Dog!!!

Make me proud to be a Democrat! :applause:Jimmy Carter and all of our Democrat presidents too! I bet whomever is the next Democrat president will too! :kick:

[Tom Joad]

9. This from a man who bombed Sudan's only pharmaceutical factory,

that directly resulted in the deaths of thousands.

[quiet.american]

10. Wow! Bill Clinton just smashed through a popular conundrum of NGO's and Big Pharma.

Much in the way that there's so much jawing about what we're going to do about Iraq while time marches on and thousands die, in my experience, non-government organizations that work to deliver life-saving drugs to the public sector are always doing a two-step with the Big Pharma companies who subsidize them, with the insurmountable point of contention always being, of course, that Big Pharma must make a profit! After that comes up, the conversation essentially goes nowhere and ends with a promise to keep "searching" for the solution.

This is fantastic that Clinton created a paradigm to smash through that bureaucracy and is getting it done.