Clinton rolls out drug subsidy plan to fight malaria in Tanzania
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania: The former U.S. president, Bill Clinton, announced the start of a program Sunday to make subsidized malaria drugs available in Tanzania in a test that could serve as a blueprint for Africa.
The project will make life-saving ACT drugs available at 90 percent less than the current market price to a national drug wholesaler, which will then distribute them to rural shops.
Malaria, caused by a parasite carried by mosquitoes, kills up to 3 million people a year worldwide and makes 300 million seriously ill. Ninety percent of deaths are in Africa south of the Sahara, mostly among young children. Many of those lives could be saved with modern artemisinin combination therapy, or ACT, drugs, which are far more effective than older treatments like chloroquine. But a price of up to $8 to $10 per treatment puts them out of reach for many people.
“Not one soul should die of malaria,” Clinton said at a town outside Dar es Salaam after touring three medical stores.
Drug makers like Novartis and Sanofi-Aventis have reduced the cost of ACT medicines to around $1 when they are used in the public sector, but the majority of Africans buy their medicine privately.
In Tanzania, around half of patients with malaria seek treatment through private drug shops instead of through public health facilities, and most are unable to afford ACTs. Instead, they usually buy older drugs that are 20 to 30 times cheaper but are often ineffective because of drug resistance.
The pilot program by the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative is designed to test the practicality of subsidizing ACT drugs as a way to increase their use, a foundation spokesman said. The program will be rolled out in two areas in central Tanzania and targets 450,000 people in a year. ACT treatments are derived from a medicinal Chinese plant and are costly to manufacture. International organizations and governments, including those from the Netherlands and Britain, are considering a multimillion-dollar global subsidy plan for ACT medicines.
Awa Marie Coll-Seck, executive director of the Roll Back Malaria Partnership group, an organization backed by the United Nations, told reporters in London this year that she hoped a $300 million global plan could be introduced as early as 2008.
Clinton, who is visiting South Africa, Malawi, Zambia and Tanzania, said after meeting the Zambian president, Levy Mwanawasa, that his foundation would provide support for skills training for medical personnel there to honor Zambia for its impressive fight against AIDS.
Clinton said his Foundation and Unitaids, a global anti-AIDS group, had agreed to a deal with pharmaceutical firms to reduce prices of anti-retroviral, or ARV, drugs for poorer nations. Prices of ARVs for poor nations will be about $25 to $60 per person per year, down from about $200.
In Malawi, Clinton inspected a $70 million, 80-bed hospital under construction in Neno, one the poorest districts in the country, south of the commercial city of Blantyre. The hospital will completed in March next year and Clinton promised to officially open it.
