DR Peter Piot, the executive director of United Nations AIDS (UNAIDS) and assistant secretary-general of the UN, has said one of the greatest injustices of modern society was the inability to provide affordable treatment and drugs for people living with HIV/AIDS.

In an interview with JIS News, Dr Piot said that access to treatment and care was an integral part of the response to the epidemic. He added that when people became sick the usual response was treatment, however, in the case of HIV/AIDS this was dependent on the accessibility to drugs required for treatment and which country the person resided.

“When you have HIV/AIDS infection and you happen to live in a wealthy country you have access to life-saving drugs and they not only extend your life but they improve the quality of your life. You are able to go back to work and lead a fairly normal life albeit on a complicated treatment schedule,” he said.

He noted, however, that this was not the case in developing countries where a major obstacle to accessing treatment was the high price of the drugs, adding that UNAIDS, for the past few years, had been working to reduce the price of anti-retroviral medications.

Noting that UNAIDS had been successful in reducing the price of AIDS drugs. Dr Piot said that currently the cost of drugs each year for a patient was approximately US$1,200 down from US$10,000.

He noted that UNAIDS had been working with CARICOM as a bloc in negotiate with pharmaceutical companies to secure more affordable AIDS drugs.

“UNAIDS has also been working with producers of generic versions of AIDS medicines, so that I am moderately optimistic that in the next year or so one will see far more access to these medicines due to a fall in price,” he said.

He said, however, that pursuing this route would also require investments in laboratory infrastructure and training of medical personnel.

Dr Piot cited Brazil as a success story in providing treatment for persons living with HIV/AIDS. He said that not only was Brazil able to avert infection of “probably a million persons” but also offer affordable treatment because they produced some of the anti-AIDS drugs themselves in an effort to keep the price down.

But despite the progress made in the reduction of prices, Dr Piot said that the effort was still not enough to quell the onslaught of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. He stressed that a multi-sectoral approach was necessary in every country to reduce the number of infected persons.