Leading user of antiretrovirals

A total of 10,000 people, or one third of the 30,000 antiretroviral (ARV) users in sub-Saharan Africa, are in Uganda, the ministry of health announced this week. "Uganda has been able to achieve this because it has made a marathon roll out of Voluntary Counselling and Testing or VCT's, which is necessary if drug misuse, and eventual resistance is to be avoided," the Minister of State for Health, Mike Mukula, told PlusNews on Wednesday. "The first important step in this, was the government's rise, from the beginning, to the challenge of admitting that AIDS was a wide-spread problem, thus removing the stigma of admission," he added. On top of this, the drop in prices of ARVs was a key factor, he said, and Uganda's willingness to import "controversial" generic drugs from India and Brazil which cost a fraction of the price of patented drugs, which are made by larger pharmaceuticals. Since the campaign against expensive western drugs started in the late 1990s, the price of combination treatment has fallen from an average US $600 a month to US $30 per month. This increased the number of people able to afford the triple therapy treatment, from less than 1,000 two years ago to 10,000 today. "It is still too expensive at $30 for most patients to afford," Dr Sissy Kityo, a scientist at the Joint Clinical Research Centre, told PlusNews. "But the price has stabilised at that price for months now." There are an estimated 120,000 people estimated to be living with full-blown AIDS in Uganda. HIV/ AIDS has claimed more than a million lives since it was first discovered in 1982. The government has maintained a policy of prevention due to the high cost of treatment.