Symbolic imageFunding, not supply, is now the bottleneck: the World AIDS Conference in Rio is dominated by aid money that fails to arrive, above all from the Trump administration, while new infections rise, the FAZ reports.
HIV prevention in pill form, taken by people who are not infected to keep them from acquiring the virus, has long been constrained less by science than by cost and supply. Merck has developed a new prevention pill, and the central question around it has been whether it would be priced and produced in a way that reaches the countries where HIV is most prevalent. Licensing generic manufacturing to other companies is the mechanism by which a patented drug can be made at low cost in and for those countries. The reported figure of about $5 per person per year, and the choice of manufacturers in Africa and India, are the terms of that arrangement as described by the New York Times. Whether comparable access follows in other regions, including much of Latin America, is not yet established.
At the World AIDS Conference in Rio de Janeiro everything revolves around aid money that is failing to arrive, above all from the Trump administration, the FAZ reported on Saturday. New infection numbers are rising even though the virus could be kept in check, according to the paper.
Experts told the Guardian that new injectable PrEP could dramatically reduce HIV infections worldwide, but that USAID cuts and a sharp decline in prevention investment are preventing access. The Telegraph reported that trials show lenacapavir can all but eliminate infection, yet almost no one can obtain it in the Latin American countries where it was tested.
The Trump administration cut the WHO off from Gavi vaccine alliance funding, Al Jazeera reported, following a long-running feud between Trump and the UN health body. Russia's Health Ministry said cuts to global HIV funding will not cause an epidemic in Russia because its HIV programmes do not depend on international money, while Gennady Onishchenko called the UN forecast of a new HIV epidemic not unfounded and said richer countries must pay for treatment in poorer ones.
Declining international financing could undo progress that has brought new HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths to their lowest level in more than 30 years, Politika reports. The article warns of a renewed spread of the epidemic.
Merck has arranged for companies in Africa and India to manufacture generic versions of its new HIV prevention pill, which could cost as little as $5 per person per year, according to the New York Times. The step is aimed at the regions carrying the heaviest HIV burden. Access in much of Latin America remains uncertain.