Innovative HIV Treatment Becomes Accessible All over the World

The World Heath Organization and UNAIDS have announced approval of a revolutionary pricing agreement that will facilitate access to the first affordable and all-purpose single-pill HIV regimen including Dolutegravir (DTG) for the public sector in low and middle-income countries. Its price will be around 75 US dollars per person per year.
The agreement is intended to speed up implementation of the global initiative on providing high-quality ARV therapy to all 36,7 million people living with HIV.
In 2016 just over half of people living with HIV had access to essential medicines.
“For many years the East Europe and Central Asia Union of PLWH (ECUO) has struggled to make innovative ARV treatment affordable in our region. And I’m happy that one of our main goals turns into reality!
Those people who just a while ago didn’t support even the idea of transition to innovative treatment and stood for Efavirenz in the first-line therapy are not so adamant now, if not to say they have changed their mind.  
The pricing agreement will heavily influence national HIV treatment programs.
So now all of us should join forces and immediately and effectively work with national teams that prepare governmental treatment guidelines, so that integraze inhibitors, Dolutegravir in this case, would be included into essential medicines list. They must be included into the guidelines as the first-line drugs in the major treatment regimen for patients with HIV who just start their treatment,” wrote in his blog Vladimir Zhovtyak, the President of the ECUO.
According to UNAIDS official website, the agreement, announced by the South African and Kenyan governments together with the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), UNITAID, the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development, the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, with Mylan Laboratories Limited and Aurobindo Pharma, is an important step toward ensuring the availability of worldwide high-quality treatment for HIV.