Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has called for a drastic reduction in the price of a key medication used to prevent HIV infection, as the International AIDS Conference begins in Rio de Janeiro on Sunday.<\/p>\n
“No one should be excluded from HIV prevention simply because a medicine is being kept artificially expensive,” said Melissa Scharwey, a global health expert at MSF.<\/p>\n
The organization is demanding a price of around $40 per person per year for the drug lenacapavir and for the widespread production of lower-cost generic versions.<\/p>\n
According to MSF, US pharmaceutical company Gilead charges $28,000 for a year’s supply of lenacapavir, which requires two injections.<\/p>\n
This price applies to the treatment of people already living with HIV in the United States, not to its use as a preventive medication. MSF argues that this is unaffordable for health care systems in low- and middle-income countries.<\/p>\n
Two injections instead of daily pills<\/p>\n
For HIV prevention, lenacapavir is administered twice a year by injection, offering an alternative to the daily tablets used for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP).<\/p>\n
According to the German AIDS Action Alliance, around 1.2 million people become newly infected with HIV each year worldwide, while approximately 570,000 people die from AIDS-related illnesses.<\/p>\n
For the first time, more than half of all new HIV infections now occur outside sub-Saharan Africa, according to the organization.<\/p>\n
At the same time, global efforts to combat HIV are under increasing pressure because of a sharp decline in international health funding.<\/p>\n
The conference in Rio de Janeiro, organized by the International Aids Society, runs until Friday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has called for a drastic reduction in the price of a key medication used…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":544579,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[267658,134,2830,54118,267657,267659,111,139,69,45117,107136],"class_list":["post-544578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-doctors-without-borders","tag-health","tag-hiv","tag-hiv-prevention","tag-hiv-transmission","tag-living-with-hiv","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-rio-de-janeiro","tag-world-aids-day"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544578"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544578\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/544579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}