Clinton Foundation gets big price reduction--40 cents a day for three-drug combination.

On October 23 the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative announced that four generic pharmaceutical manufacturers had agreed to reduce prices for some African and Caribbean countries to about $140 per year for triple-drug antiretroviral therapy--less than 40 cents a day. The reductions were possible because business executives volunteering with the Foundation helped reduce raw-materials cost, in part by developing a much larger market for the drugs in poor countries; the Foundation is also developing funding for infrastructure. The drugs are nevirapine, 3TC, and either AZT or d4T; the combinations will be manufactured in a single pill taken twice a day.

UNAIDS (the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS) applauded the announcement in an October 23 press statement, and noted that it would help the "3x5" initiative of the World Health Organization and UNAIDS (the effort to get treatment access to 3,000,000 people by 2005), and the work of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.

For more information see "Clinton Program Would Help Poor Nations Get AIDS Drugs," by Mark Schools, The Wall Street Journal, October 23, 2003, and "Clinton Group Gets Discount for AIDS Drugs" by Lawrence Altman, The New York Times, October 23.