#TreatPeopleRight – Highlights from the ITPC Annual Review

Campaign activity contributing to combined savings of US$700 million for health budgets is among ITPC’s 2016 highlights.

The mission of the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition (ITPC) is clear: To enable people in need to access optimal HIV treatment.

That’s why Make Medicines Affordable is a key campaign for ITPC, which leads the coalition of organisations working on treatment access. Here’s a flavour of the challenges and our impact in 2016.

A key challenge in 2016 was seeing how “governments that were leading the way on ‘access to medicines’ are now actively working against civil society in India, Thailand, Russia, Argentina and Brazil,” says Solange Baptiste, ITPC Executive Director.

Baptiste continues: “The true power to influence the changes needed ultimately lies with those people most affected by HIV.”

Campaign highlights

Here are just some of our campaign highlights showing just how civil society is leading the way.

  • Othoman Mellouk, ITPC’s Intellectual Property and Access to Medicines lead, spoke at the Civil Society Hearing as part of the UN Assembly High level Meeting on Ending AIDS. See Facebook post.
  • Following action by consortium partner ABIA, dolutegravir became part of the national HIV program in Brazil. Dolutegravir has better efficacy and fewer side effects than comparable drugs. Read Othoman Mellouk’s blog post about the news.
  • Make Medicines Affordable partners, and allies from around the world, wrote an open letter to the WHO Director General. We urged her to give the UN Secretary-General’s High level Panel on Access to Medicines. report, and recommendations, the attention they deserve. Read the open-letter.

In this interactive map (scroll down to ‘reach and results’) you can see where we have led patent oppositions, where they have been successful so far, and where we have delivered training to civil society partners and UN agencies on interventions to counter intellectual property barriers.

Our intellectual property interventions contributed to projected combined annual savings of almost US$700 million for national health budgets in Argentina, Brazil, Ukraine, and Thailand. The savings mean cash-strapped health budgets in the four countries can afford to treat many more people. In Argentina that equates to 27,000 more people on HIV treatment for 10 years – see infographic here.

Read more on our impact on access to medicines, and broader achievements in the ITPC 2016 Annual Review online summary or read in full here, and sign up regular news from the campaign here.