  
Companies promise more AIDS-related drug price cuts for poor
Last Updated: 2001-04-05 17:46:00 EDT (Reuters Health)
By Abigail Levene
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan won agreement from six major drug companies on Thursday to keep cutting prices of AIDS-related treatments for the world's poorest nations.
"The companies have agreed to continue and accelerate reducing prices substantially, with a special emphasis on the least developed countries," Annan said in a statement after meeting officials of the six companies. The firms had also agreed "to continue to offer affordable medicines to other developing countries, on a country-by-country basis," he added.
U.N. officials said Annan could not divulge financial details of the agreements because the companies worried about accusations of antitrust violations. Annan met top executives of Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Abbott Laboratories Inc., Bristol-Myers Squibb, Hoffman-Laroche and Germany's Boehringer Ingelheim in Amsterdam to urge them to offer cheap access to anti-AIDS drugs.
Annan said the companies' new commitments furthered the progress they had made in reducing prices since last May, when five drug companies signed a joint statement of intent with the United Nations.
That deal involved country-by-country negotiations with developing nations and only five states have signed contracts, prompting health advocacy groups to accuse the United Nations of having promoted programs by drug companies without getting much in return.
The new accord would offer AIDS drug plans to the least developed countries as a group, a U.N. official said in New York. The official said Merck & Co., which had participated in the meeting last year, was invited to join the new program, but declined.
Annan said, "The way we have dealt with the needs of the developing world in recent years is simply not adequate." The agreement reached on Thursday "represents a contribution to the global response to the epidemic going much further than any of us could have predicted 12 months ago," he said.
With more than 40 pharmaceutical companies currently taking the South African government to court over patent rights, Annan commented that "intellectual property protection is key to bringing forward new medicines, vaccines and diagnostics urgently needed for the health of the world's poorest people."
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