Pharmacist Sudhir Sathe stands by an idle production line. By now, he says, desperately needed antiretrovirals (ARVs) for 70,000 AIDS patients a month could be rolling off the gleaming conveyor belt.
Bethlehem Pharmaceuticals – one of only two factories in Ethiopia licensed to produce the potentially life-saving ARVs – blames the static situation on international funding delays. We do not need to state the urgency of getting these drugs out, said 51-year-old Sathe, who has worked in the pharmaceutical industry for 27 years. We are frustrated.
The Bethlehem Pharmaceuticals factory, sited in the outskirts of the capital, Addis Ababa, was awarded a licence to start producing the drugs in early August. The other factory so licensed is in northern Ethiopia.
Ethiopia has 2 million people living with HIV. The virus has orphaned some 1 million children. Experts estimate that the virus kills around 600 people a day, while two-thirds of all deaths in Addis Ababa of people aged between 20 and 54 are AIDS-related.
But, says Bethlehem s chief executive, Yordanos Tadese, despite promises by international organisations, no funds have been forthcoming.
The factory was opened by Trade Minister Girma Biru in a blaze of publicity last year. Now, Yordanos says, it is imperative that funds be found to make it possible for locally manufactured ARVs to be produced. He says he could produce them more cheaply than the cost of current generic imports, and has been ready to start production of the desperately needed medicines for the past six months.
We have got the capacity, we are ready to go, but we need international organisations to release funds to the country as soon as possible, said Yordanos, a former stockbroker based in the USA. We could have started producing them as soon as we got the licence if we had had the financial support, he added. He went on to say that the initial cost of buying the raw materials needed for manufacturing the ARVs was too high for his firm to underwrite without additional funding and support.
Meanwhile, banks in the country were unwilling to finance the production of ARVs drugs as they considered the enterprise too risky, Yordanos told PlusNews.
The company, which is currently producing antimalarial drugs and antibiotics, is seeking funding through the World Health Organisation (WHO) under its 3 by 5 initiative. The US dollar 350-million scheme, which was launched on World AIDS Day in December 2003, aims to treat 3 million people by the end of 2005. Ethiopia is one of the 20 countries to benefit from the programme. WHO experts visited the Bethlehem factory in this context in January.
WHO estimates that 6 million people infected by HIV in the developing world need access to ARV therapy to survive, but only 400,000 so far have access. In Africa, where 70 percent of all people living with HIV/AIDS reside, drugs are available to just 100,000 people – a mere 2 percent of those in need, says WHO.
Kilde: Irinnews (FN)
