Top firms in talks for HIV drugs giveaway

London – Seven of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies, including GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer, are in talks…

Seven of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies, including GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer, are in talks with a leading international workers’ organisation that could result in HIV drugs being given free to some of the world’s poorest nations.The talks are being held between the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions and the main producers of HIV drugs.Besides Pfizer, the world’s biggest drugs firm, and Glaxo, they include US firms Bristol-Myers Squibb and Abbott Laboratories; Swiss-based Merck and Roche; and the family owned German business Boehringer Ingelheim.The talks got under way six months ago after a US-based consultant, acting for many of the pharmaceutical companies, approached the international workers’ federation about supplying HIV drugs to poor countries where the virus is rampant.The aim is to provide individual patients with a tailor-made cocktail of antiretroviral HIV drugs, either for free or at affordable prices. The talks are focused on sub-Saharan Africa and on those nations on the UN’s list of the world’s 49 least developed countries. The issue has been a controversial one. Many of the drug companies have been criticised for their apparent refusal to provide affordable treatments.But the the federation’s general secretary, Fred Higgs, is confident the talks will be successful.”I’m optimistic that we will get a good result,” he said. “I don’t believe that, if the companies are serious, it will take us any longer than the end of the first quarter of next year for something beneficial to come out of it.”Many of the drug companies sell drug treatments at cheap rates, but the workers’ federation is keen to bring the prices down further under a single agreement with the producers.The federation has 20 million members and 400 affiliated unions. It represents chemical workers in the pharmaceutical industry and in sectors hard hit by HIV, such as energy and mining in developing regions of sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America.Higgs said: “[The federation] is strategically positioned to make a difference.” – The Independent.(Source: Business Report)