What is at stake in access to anti-HIV/AIDS generic medicines ?

Since multitherapies were launched, international donors have been claiming that the cost of such medicines is too high for them to pay for the medical care of people living with HIV/AIDS in poor countries.

The cost of antiretroviral medicines is a difficult problem, but so is the very high cost of some treatments for opportunistic illnesses(nizorat, fluconazol, acyclovir etc), or of diagnostic tests and monitoring tools.

For two years, however, generic copies of particularly expensive antiretrovirals have been produced in developing countries by public institutions (Brazil, Thailand) or private companies (India) and sold at much lower prices than those of brand-name drugs by patent holders.

Thus we are no longer constrained to accept a market monopoly, which has had serious repercussions in terms of prices...