AIDS 2016: Significant drop in cost of HIV treatment in last 10 years

The week-long gathering in Durban has highlighted the drop in funding and the cost of treatment - and also called for the inclusion and involvement of key populations in bringing an end the disease.

Delegates at the International Aids Conference in Durban have heard that the backbone of any scale up programme is the availability of low-cost quality medicines.

Medecins Sans Frontieres or Doctors Without Borders, yesterday unpacked the latest in drug pricing in antiretroviral treatment.

With no vaccine or cure for the virus, people who test positive for HIV require a lifelong triple drug ART to reduce the virus in the blood and reduce the mortality associated with HIV.

Jessica Burry who’s the HIV/Hepatitis-C pharmacist from the MSF Access Campaign, says they’ve seen prices come down significantly in the last 10 years.

"So this year the first line treatment for HIV which is Tenofovir 32C and efavirenz has come down to one hundred dollars per person per year so that represents a 99% decrease since the last time we were in Durban in 2000 when the cost of treatment per person per year was ten thousand dollars," she said.

Medical Field Coordinator for MSF South Africa Vivian Cox, says there are many countries in sub-Saharan Africa that don’t yet have routine viral load monitoring programmes.

"As these countries are encouraged to roll out viral load monitoring we are worried that we are going to begin seeing many more patients with high viral loads on first or second line regiments and this can be due to either poor adherence or struggles with adherence to drug resistance or both," she said.