Doctors Without Borders

Access to Essential Medicines: Ten Stories That Mattered in 2011

1. Getting Ahead of the Wave of New HIV Infections to Turn the Tide on AIDS

Three decades into the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and after 30 million deaths, landmark scientific findings this year show that providing people with HIV treatment early not only saves their lives but can reduce the risk of transmitting the virus to others by 96 percent—in effect demonstrating that early treatment of HIV is also prevention.

The question now is therefore how to make expansion of treatment both feasible and affordable—a challenge MSF has been grappling with in its projects since beginning to treat HIV in developing countries more than ten years ago.

MSF has learned, through experience, how care can reach more people in resource-limited settings—for example by decentralizing treatment from central hospitals to health centers and to community health posts, so it is available closer to where people live; and by shifting medical tasks from doctors to nurses, and in turn to community health workers, to overcome human resource shortages.

Ensuring treatment is affordable is equally critical—competition among generic producers is what has brought prices for HIV medicines down by more than 99 percent over the last decade. But more must be done to rein in drug prices, particularly for newer medicines.

Photo: Kenya 2011 © Sven Torfinn