FOR Khadija, it’s been her childhood’s fairytale story about the discovery of miracle cure told all over again – with all the usual twists and turns. Her hopes having been revived after she was pulled back right from the brink, she is desperate now for a happy ending when the magic wand is waved.

She has just sent her documents to a local pharmaceutical distributor assigned the supply of an orally-administered drug that promises to cure Hepatitis C, 95 times out of 100. Her eligibility as a recipient for the medicine has been established by a doctor’s prescription, backed by clinical tests performed on her.

The strict regime had to be followed to prevent the procurement of the drug for business. Since there is a huge difference between the prices here and in the West, there is plenty of temptation for a few enterprising souls to procure it here and then resell it on the international market, making a neat fortune in the process.

There are many who will be advocating a less complicated procedure for getting this drug that has been promoted as an elixir for life.

The medicine has been used in the United States since 2013, where it is still a high-price option. According to news reports, Pakistan has been lucky in securing a deal where the manufacturers have agreed to sell the drugs at a fraction of what they are charging elsewhere. This may sound like an extremely unlikely example for these times but Pakistan’s status as a developing country as well as the unfortunately high number of Hepatitis C cases here are said to have convinced the makers of the drug to provide it at nominal rates.

It has taken time proceeding to the current stage, where it appears poised to play the saviour in the lives of thousands of Pakistanis. But this is a pre-cure miracle in itself in Pakistan: that it is not just available but available here at prices many times cheaper than the price at which it is sold in some Western countries.

At over Rs30,000 per month for a treatment course stretched possibly over six months, it may still sound expensive and out of the reach of so many in the country. Yet, in fact, this is a huge improvement on the Rs55,000-a-month tag that was placed on it originally.

Like Khadija in Lahore and Ayla in a small town in Sindh, many have been closely following the journey of the medicine, their fates tied to its availability here. Many of these patients in need of treatment for Hepatitis C came to know about the drug through news stories about the hurdles that had to be removed before it could be supplied here.

There was initially the issue about the price, for very few could have afforded the treatment here with costs put as high as more than Rs8 million. The price as well as the selection of a distributor took a while, and after this mountain had been climbed, there remained the matter of getting it registered with the government.

The long process was marked by the usual, desperate-sounding but as always remarkably low-key stories about delays that could have been avoided and lives that could have been saved. The government was blamed for being too caught up in its old habit of deliberating long and hard before nodding its approval at various stages of bureaucratic supervision. There were doctors who appealed for an early clearance of the drug, many of them prescribing it to their patients in anticipation of an official approval, and journalists, typically, advocated speed.

As always happens, for some the drug never arrived. It is not difficult at all to come up with cases here of those who could have survived and lived longer with more prompt intervention. And there are many such as Khadija and Ayla who will be advocating a less complicated procedure for getting this drug that has been promoted as an elixir for life.

Ayla says she had filed her documents for securing the medicine in December. In the time since then she has feared a relapse into a condition that had at one stage rendered this mother of three virtually immobile for many months.

Khadija looked the happiest in many years after she sent her documents to the distribution company assigned with the supply of the miracle Hepatitis C drug in Pakistan last Wednesday. She hoped to be on the medicine in a few days’ time, the recent downward revision in the price of the drug providing her some extra relief.

The office secretary at a private firm in Lahore, she has lived with the illness for almost a decade. She underwent a course of injections some eight years back, recalling them to be the most miserable months of her life. The injections shook her up brutally. There was physical pain and psychological scarring, and a sense of resignation hung so thick that it was impossible to not cynically dismiss all that advice about the merits of optimism as words meant to facilitate the journey towards the exit.

More bad news confronted her some years later when she was told that her ailment could only be contained to a point, and could not be uprooted. The injections, she was informed on a wave of stats thrown her way, promised less than 50pc success. But if that left her devastated, it turned out that she was less prone to trying the home remedies that everyone was so eager to offer her out of sympathy, voluntarily and at a price.

She will now tell you that she finds herself fortunate for having the resources to pay for the miracle orally-administered medicine. She will tell you that unlike her, many cannot even think of buying this promised magic remedy and would be inclined to put their bodies and their lives at the mercy of all kinds of weird solutions hailed by quacks and by those who have no option but to put their faith in the unproven.

For her sake, and the sake of all the other lives that are to be saved out there, let us hope that this latest miracle built on research and experience and knowledge lives up to its promise.

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.

Published in Dawn, March 27th, 2015

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