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Young HIV victims must not be forgotten
By Alfred Romann (China Daily)
Updated: 2005-09-22 06:25 Costly treatment
Price is another barrier. Drug cocktails available for children can be four
times as expensive as those for adults.
Low prices for locally produced first-line adult drug cocktails - the first
treatment an infected person can take before developing a resistance and having
to switch to second generation treatments - have allowed the government to
publicly offer free drugs to all adult patients as part of its "Four Frees and
One Care" programme.
But virulent side effects and a lack of variety often keep patients away. The
most common treatments produced in China do not work well with a common strain
of the virus that goes hand in hand with hepatitis. In fact, one of the
treatments' components exacerbates hepatitis.
On the other hand, the fact that affordable drugs are available at all is an
improvement. For years, drug prices in China - and around the world - were just
too high.
Since the turn of the millennium prices have dropped from thousands of US
dollars per year to less than a couple of hundred in some cases because of mass
production and distribution, particularly in India.
"It was generic production that brought down the prices of AIDS drugs from
over US$10,000 to as little as US$150 per patient per year," Ellen Hoen,
director of policy advocacy for MSF, said in a report for a world conference on
HIV/AIDS in Brazil in July.
Still, second-line treatments and drug combinations with milder side effects
are still very expensive. Children's formulations are similarly expensive and
can cost thousands of US dollars per year.
A number of factors have combined to keep drug companies from producing
generic children's drugs. The low number of child patients means the market is
small.
It is also much more difficult to ship and store children's treatments which
are often in syrup form and must be refrigerated. Others are powders that
require clean drinking water, while liquid formulations can be difficult to
measure.
The result is that infected children are given adult medicines ground up to
adjust the dosages.
Before the Clinton Foundation got involved, children's
anti-retroviral treatments were basically not available to the Chinese
population at large.
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