The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday said it has held a meeting with nine pharmaceutical companies to negotiate cuts in the price of antiretroviral drugs used to treat AIDS.
The CDC said yesterday it expects them to set an example of social responsibility in the industry and to contribute positively to sustaining treatment programs that the government has been carrying out for years.
The CDC said that several drug companies agreed to lower prices by 2.1 percent to 17.5 percent last year, helping the government to save NT$170 million (US$5.7 million). It added that it expects negotiations to result in another 15 percent price reduction for drugs for AIDS treatments this year.
According to the CDC, in 1997 the government began to assign a budget for the purchase of drugs required for Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART), the aggressive treatment regimens used to suppress the HIV viral load and maintain the function of patients’ immune systems.
The financial burden was transferred to the National Health Insurance in 1998, but was again shouldered by the government in 2006, and has since remained that way.
With the cumulative increase in the number of surviving patients, government expenditure on treatments and drugs has been rising at a pace of 18 percent a year, the center said. Last year alone, approximately NT$3 billion was spent on AIDS treatments, NT$2.58 billion of which was for drugs.
Most of the antiretroviral drugs are still patented and are thus expensive, the CDC said.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
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