Cape Town - Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has assured the country there is no shortage of antiretroviral (ARV) drugs to treat millions of people with HIV.
Motsoaledi said on Sunday despite reports from Kwa-Zulu-Natal that the system was almost collapsing, the country was running the most comprehensive HIV treatment programme in the world. The reports that there was a shortage of HIV drugs, which threatened the lives of millions of patients, were unfounded and baseless, the minister said.
Motsoaledi said he was forced to cut short his visit to Geneva, Switzerland, last week when the story broke in KZN, and they searched for its source.
The woman who appeared on a TV programme saying they had not received drugs was not even being treated at the clinic where she claimed she was treated.
He said the current tender for the distribution of the fixed dose combination (FDC) was R14 billion.
They had checked with all their facilities and districts, and found the FDC stock was available.
“We also made sure that we have different suppliers of the FDCs for strategic reasons. So we can assure you that at no stage did we have a shortage of the FDC of ARVs in the country,” he said.
The minister said the HIV treatment programme had expanded massively since 2009, and now there were more than 3 million people on the programme. Next year they would increase the number of people on HIV treatment to 4.6 million.
He said currently 30 percent of people in the world on HIV treatment were in South Africa.
There was no dispute that South Africa ran the biggest programme in the world.
He said the only drug there was a shortage of was Abacavir, which was used to treat children, and that was beyond their control.
He said the reason there was a shortage of this drug was because pharmaceutical companies told them they had difficulty getting the ingredients for the drug.
This was not because the government had failed to pay suppliers for the delivery of ARVs. Governments globally were dependent on pharmaceutical companies to manufacture drugs as they did not have the capacity to develop them.
This issue was also discussed at the health conference in Geneva last week.
Currently, there were no drugs to treat tropical diseases because pharmaceutical companies were closing shop in developing countries because it did not make business sense to continue to operate there.
Political Bureau