Nobel winner slams Singapore over HIV treatment costs
New HIV infections in the nation of 4.6 million people rose to 456 in 2008 from 242 in 2003, according to the health ministry. Barre-Sinoussi, 62, said the burden is probably greater because people may be dissuaded from getting tested.
“The stigma, the fact that they have to pay for everything, it’s the worst conditions for stimulating people to be tested and treated,” she said in an interview at the French embassy in Singapore yesterday. “The numbers they announce are probably much lower than the numbers they have.”
Singapore’s government has opened more anonymous testing clinics, boosted HIV education programs and produced a soap opera to curb new infections of HIV, which have doubled in the past 10 years, even as the spread of the virus slowed in neighboring Malaysia and Thailand.
Treatment can cost as much as S$1,500 ($1,073) a month in Singapore and most insurers don’t cover the costs, said Stuart Koe, chief executive officer of Fridae.com, Asia’s largest gay Web site. Generic versions of AIDS drugs aren’t available in Singapore and doctors in the city-state often advise patients to buy cheaper, copycat pills in Malaysia or Thailand, he said.
“It’s a shame because Singapore is considered by many to be a developed country,” Koe said in a telephone interview yesterday. “The HIV-AIDS community here is way behind most of the neighboring countries as a result.”
The health ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment. The government said in January it would subsidize HIV treatment for patients who can’t afford it.
‘Difficult to Accept’
An anonymous HIV test costs S$30, according to Action for AIDS, which runs Singapore’s biggest anonymous testing clinic.
“Coming from a country where everything is free, it’s difficult to accept,” said Barre-Sinoussi, who is head of Institut Pasteur’s regulation of retroviral infections unit in Paris. “The situation is even worse than in developing countries not far from here. In Cambodia, everything is free.”
In France, which has 64 million people, new HIV cases fell to 6,940 in 2008 from 8,930 in 2003, data presented at an AIDS conference last month show.
In 1983, Barre-Sinoussi co-wrote a report with Luc Montagnier in the journal Science that detailed the discovery of the pathogen that later became known as human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV.
HIV-AIDS is the world’s deadliest infectious disease. About 33 million people were living with HIV, 2.7 million were newly infected with the virus and 2 million people died from an AIDS- related complication in 2008, according to the World Health Organization’s latest estimates.
By Simeon Bennett
Bloomberg.com
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aEM9mu7BJTDY
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