NEW YORK (AP) — Former US President Bill Clinton announced Thursday that he had secured a deal with four generic-drug companies to provide low-cost AIDS drugs to the developing world.

The agreement will cut the price of a triple-drug regimen to approximately 38 cents a day, Clinton said at a news conference at his Harlem office.

“This agreement will allow the delivery of lifesaving medicines to people who desperately need them,” Clinton said. “It represents a big breakthrough in our efforts to begin treatment programmes in places where, until now, there has been virtually no medicine and therefore no hope.”

Under the deal brokered by the William J Clinton Presidential Foundation, three Indian companies and one South African firm opened their books to a group of Clinton advisers, who then worked with the companies to cut costs.

Patented versions of the regimen run at least $1.54 per day. Where available, the discounted generic regimen costs 55 cents per day.

Clinton said he hoped up to 2 million people would receive the lifesaving medicine by 2008.

The foundation has also helped several Caribbean and African nations prepare detailed plans for introducing the drugs. The plans are intended to make the drugs more readily available throughout each nation.

In Geneva, the World Health Organisation welcomed the Clinton initiative and all efforts to reduce the price of AIDS medicines and make them available to those in need.

“Providing AIDS treatment to those who most urgently need it in poor countries is the most urgent health challenge the world faces,” WHO Director-General Dr. Lee Jong-wook said in a statement. WHO and its partners are committed to delivering antiretroviral therapy to three million people in developing countries by the end of 2005, the U.N. health agency said.

To pay for the drugs, and for improvements in the countries’ health systems, Clinton has secured partial funding by lobbying wealthy nations including Ireland and Canada. Ireland has committed $58.3 million over five years, mainly to Mozambique.

“Usually I just call the prime minister or the president,” Clinton told the Journal, “and tell them what we’re doing and ask them to have somebody look at it. And I always tell them that even though we’re friends they don’t have to do this for me — don’t do it unless they think it’s a good thing.”

Clinton’s foundation has been working with the governments of Rwanda, Mozambique, Tanzania and several Caribbean nations to fund AIDS treatment.

The three African nations have each secured additional funds from other sources including the World Bank and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.