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afrol News, 13 March - Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo, visiting the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, is advocating the production of cheap generic AIDS drugs in Côte d'Ivoire to be able to effectively address the pandemic in his country. Meeting WHO Director Gro Harlem Brundtland, Gbagbo pointed out that Côte d'Ivoire counted more than one million HIV-positive individuals. Several bigger developing countries have found a way around high AIDS drug prices by making cheap copies of Western drugs, often costing only one tenth of the imported version. India makes 70 percent of its own drugs, while Egypt, Brazil, Thailand and Argentina have taken major steps to become more self-reliant in pharmaceuticals. Côte d'Ivoire - Western Africa's most industrialised and most HIV-infected country - wants to follow in these footsteps. The public health sector in Côte d'Ivoire was "not adequate" to meet the enormous costs and tasks of the rapidly spreading AIDS pandemic, President Gbagbo told Mrs. Brundtland. The situation could only be brought under control if the country could produce its own, cheap pharmaceuticals. Now, in practical terms, Western drugs are unavailable because they are unaffordable. - We want to establish as much as possible of pharmaceutical industries in Côte d'Ivoire to be able to create the drugs at a cost low and to distribute them, Gbagbo was quoted by AFP as saying in Switzerland. He said that he had the entire Western African market in mind for this production. During his stay, the Ivorian President also has received a donation by the Swiss Economic Fund, offering the free provision during five years of drugs preventing HIV transmission between mothers and their unborn child. Gbagbo received the Fund's leader, Khalid Hossain, on Saturday and gladly accepted the donation. Hossain had expressed that the "confidence in the Ivorian programme" against HIV/AIDS had been decisive in making the donation. President Gbagbo indeed has proven to take the Ivorian AIDS pandemic seriously. His government has created a special HIV/AIDS Ministry - the only one of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa - in January 2001 to address the crisis. Further, the President himself is heading the national AIDS campaign. The Ivorian national plan to combat the disease for 2002-04 has a budget of US$ 27 million. According to a report by the UN development agency UNDP, one in 10 Ivorian adults and teenagers age 16 to 49 are infected with the HIV virus - one million people in all - and 600,000 children have been orphaned by HIV/AIDS. "The epidemic has become the leading cause of death among adults, and its impact threatens the country's economic, social and human development," the report says.
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