Government spends billions on ARVs
Spokesperson for the department, Sibani Mngadi said that most of the drugs cost less than the last tender with percentage decreases ranging between 20 and 71 percent. The only drug which increased in price(by 24%) was efavirenz 200mg.
Mngadi attributed the reduction in price to the ‘higher volumes and generic entry and a more competitive climate’.
Aspen Pharmacare was the biggest winner with 56,8% of the R3,615-billion tender awarded to the generic manufacturer. The awards varied from 1,9% to 56.8% of the total value, spread over six suppliers.
GlaxoSmithKline was awarded 6,9% of the tender, Adcock Ingram 20,9%, MSD 9,1%, Medpro 1,9% and Sonke 4,5%.
Mngadi said six items had not been awarded and arrangements for their procurement would soon be made.
‘The awarding of this tender once again demonstrates the continued commitment of the Department of Health to expanding access to HIV and AIDS related treatment. ‘We have to ensure that there is adequate and uninterrupted supply of the necessary medicine to the accredited treatment centres across the country,’ said Mngadi.
He claimed that the South African government ARV tender was the largest in the world and that the accumulative number of patients initiated on ARVs was more than 478 000 by the end of April 2008. ‘ health-e news service
Author
Health-e News is South Africa's dedicated health news service and home to OurHealth citizen journalism. Follow us on Twitter @HealtheNews
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Government spends billions on ARVs
by Health-e News, Health-e News
June 26, 2008