UN tardy about approving cheap AIDS drugs - MSF

The international medical NGO, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), has accused the World Health Organisation (WHO) of being tardy in its approval of cheap drugs to combat HIV/AIDS in developing countries.

MSF said millions of people lacked access to affordable treatment because WHO's drug inspection programme was "understaffed and hampered by politics".

Reuters quoted Rowan Gillies, the head of MSF's international council, as saying: "This is restricting patients' access to essential medicines in many of the places we work in, particularly in countries that have limited capacity to assess the quality of medicines themselves."

The UN health agency has responded by saying that delays were less the result of a lack of resources than a measure of the painstaking efforts undertaken to ensure that the medicines it approved met its quality standards.