Triple therapy for the world's 2.3 million people living with AIDS is not a utopian vision, claims Jorge Belloqui of Brazil. He suggests just shifting a portion of military budgets into official aid to developing countries. The US military budget of CHF460 billion, Russia's CHF175 billion, and Japan's CHF75 billion compare starkly with the CHF28 billion Belloqui estimates would provide triple therapy to every person with AIDS.

"If we brought all the developed countries up to Switzerland's aid level, the official aid budget would increase by CHF65 billion yearly. Bring it up to Canada's level, and we're talking about CHF110 billion more a year," he says.

Belloqui rejects outright the idea of restricting care to palliative measures plus treatment for certain opportunistic infections as "intolerable." Triple therapy offers survival rates of three additional years, he says.

Speaking as a Latin American, a person with HIV and a mathematician, Belloqui presented math models to explore the costs. Prices for the drugs would depend on the local market: AZT, for example, costs CHF16,500 in the industrialised world compared to CHF1,000 in Brazil or Thailand.

Producing antiretroviral generics is another option, and Belloqui advocates ignoring patent laws which, he says, unfairly increase drug prices. Prices are 20 percent higher in Malaysia, a country with intellectual property agreements, than in India where none exist.

"Are we doing research for the stock market or to save lives?" Belloqui asks. "This year is AZT's tenth anniversary. How many more years are needed to recover its research costs?"

this story can also be found in  The Bridge, the onsite print newspaper

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