China-made anti-AIDS medicine benefiting developing countries
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2004-05-23 14:58

Although it just became a country with the anti-AIDS medicine production ability less than two years ago, China has been a world supplier for developing countries and regions being harassed by AIDS with its cheap anti-AIDS medicine.

As one of the four enterprises able to produce anti-AIDS medicine in China, Shanghai Desano Biopharma Co. Ltd is exporting seven kinds of anti-AIDS material medicine to India, Thailand and Brazil. Among them the largest annual exporting amount of one kind is as much as 12 tons, said Ai Lianghua, general manager of Desano.

Like Desano, all the other three pharmaceutical companies are playing a more and more important role in the global anti-AIDS medicine market.

Last September, after passing the acceptance check and obtaining certification from the ministry of health of Brazil, Xiamen Mchem Pharma Group signed a five-year contract with the Brazilian government to become the third appointed manufacturer of anti-AIDS material medicine for Brazil in the world.

And Zhejiang Huahai Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd and the Northeast Pharmaceutical Group also see a large amount of their anti-AIDS material product exported to pharmaceutical enterprises in developing countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia such as the Republic of Korea, India and Brazil.

"Medicine to treat AIDS may be the most expensive in the world. The material medicine from China which is not only of cheap price but also of high quality will be helpful to the cost reduction of manufacturing anti-AIDS medicine, thereby benefiting our South African people," said Mervyn Webb, manager of Crane Pharmaceutical Inc. of South Africa.

According to Ai, after using material produced by Desano to manufacture anti-AIDS preparation, his partner in South Africa successfully reduced the annual medicine fee for an AIDS patient from more than 10,000 US dollars to 3,000 US dollars.

Besides providing material for anti-AIDS medicine production, after successfully manufacturing the first anti-AIDS preparation of China in August 2002, China's pharmaceutical enterprises began to list finished anti-AIDS medicine in their export agenda.

The registration for the export of Desano's anti-AIDS preparation is underway, while Xiamen Mchem Pharma Group has got the authorization from 13 countries in Africa to export anti-AIDS preparation.

"Technological lags in many African countries retarded the processing of material medicine, so our move to export finished products to these countries will make anti-AIDS drugs available to more people suffering from AIDS," said Zhang Wenhua, marketing manager of Xiamen Mchem.

Zhang gave an example of Zidovudine, an popular anti-AIDS preparation, the price of which made in China is only one-tenth of that made in pharmaceutical enterprises of developed countries.

Except for western medicine, China has also made great efforts in the exploration and research of anti-AIDS traditional Chinese medicine.

According to Lu Hongzhou, a member of the China AIDS prevention and control committee of experts, as the cocktail treatment, the most popular AIDS treatment in the world, will strengthen the drug resistance and aberrance of the virus, traditional Chinese medicine can be used as an auxiliary treatment for early-AIDS patients as all those problems don't exist in traditional Chinese medicine at all.

Anti-AIDS traditional Chinese medicine has drawn close attention from foreign anti-AIDS medicine market.

A traditional Chinese preparation manufactured by Shanghai Xiongqi Bioproducts Co. Ltd is being exported to Australia and South Africa and several kinds of traditional Chinese medicine invented by Beijing Ditan Hospital has had a good result from clinical trials in Africa.

Under the threat of AIDS' spread, China, like most countries which are suffering from the deadly contagious disease, began to realize the importance of producing homemade medicine with a lower price to control the rampant spread of the disease, said Pan Xiaozhang, a professor in AIDS prevention and treatment who is the deputy head of the AIDS team of experts of the Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

According to a survey on epidemiology, China now has nearly 80, 000 patients with AIDS and 840,000 people living with HIV (human immunodeficiency virus). The number of its people with HIV is the second in Asia and the fourteenth in the world.

"Most people who die of AIDS in the world is not because no medicine could help them but because they cannot afford to buy medicine," said Xavier Leus, World Health Organization (WHO) representative to the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and Pacific (ESCAP).

"Reducing the price of anti-AIDS medicine in developing countries has become a common goal for the global society. China's move to produce that medicine has become an important link in this great chain," said Leus.



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