GENEVA, Nov 30: The World Health Organization on Tuesday reinstated two generic AIDS drugs that had been withdrawn from an international list for failing to meet safety standards.
The WHO also urged countries to give women and girls better access to such medicines ahead of World AIDS Day on Wednesday.
The Indian pharmaceutical giant Cipla had been forced to re-test two of its anti retrovirals after the WHO delisted them in May along with three other drugs for failing to meet the required standards of clinical testing, said Lembit Rago, WHO coordinator for essential medicines and drugs.
Drug manufacturers also withdrew another 13 medicines voluntarily from the list, which contains about 30 different generic AIDS treatments, so they too could be re-evaluated, he said.
The delisting of the drugs, used widely by sufferers in poor countries, hampered the immediate treatment of HIV/AIDS, which affects 39.4 million people, but it will boost standards of care in the long term, officials said.
"It could be seen as a short-term pain, but I think it will be outweighed by a long-term gain," Rago told a news conference in Geneva. "The whole pre-qualification process has in a way been a turning point ... in terms of putting much more emphasis on the quality of drugs than has been done before," he said.
This will eventually end "the situation that has been in the past, to a certain extent, the accepted practice of poor quality drugs for poor people." WHO officials hoped that the reinstatement of Lamivudine and Lamivudine-plus-Zidovudine by Cipla would encourage other producers to speed up their re-testing process with the other 16 delisted drugs. -AFP
