India may run out of drug for HIV programme
2 Oct 2014 6:29 AM IST
India could run out of a critical medicine in its free HIV/AIDS drugs programme in three weeks due to bureaucratic bungling, a senior government official said, leaving more than 150,000 sufferers without life-saving drugs for about a month.
Missed dosages for long durations can increase patients’ drug resistance and result in faster spread of the virus, while changes in medication regimens expose patients to side effects.
As drugs in the open market are expensive, the government provides more than one-third of India’s 2.1 million HIV/AIDS patients with free antiretroviral drugs that are procured from pharmaceutical companies via a tender process.
Delays in approving such tenders has left the National AIDS Control Organisation scrambling to secure supplies of tenofovir/lamivudine tablets that are prescribed to thousands of patients during initial stages of treatment.
Several sources, company executives and documents seen by Reuters revealed that a tender for the medicine was approved last week, but supplies normally take at least 60 days to reach patients, which in this case would take it to late November.
NACO had raised the demand in January, Rathore said.
Missed dosages for long durations can increase patients’ drug resistance and result in faster spread of the virus, while changes in medication regimens expose patients to side effects.
As drugs in the open market are expensive, the government provides more than one-third of India’s 2.1 million HIV/AIDS patients with free antiretroviral drugs that are procured from pharmaceutical companies via a tender process.
Delays in approving such tenders has left the National AIDS Control Organisation scrambling to secure supplies of tenofovir/lamivudine tablets that are prescribed to thousands of patients during initial stages of treatment.
Several sources, company executives and documents seen by Reuters revealed that a tender for the medicine was approved last week, but supplies normally take at least 60 days to reach patients, which in this case would take it to late November.
NACO had raised the demand in January, Rathore said.
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