HIV meds are now strawberry flavored

Did we mention they’re strawberry-flavored and cost $1 a day? (Photo: KD Madrilejos/Rappler)

Drugmakers in South Africa are making HIV treatment for children less of a hard pill to swallow—literally.

Two weeks ago, the South Africa Health Products Regulatory Authority (SAHPRA) approved two breakthrough HIV treatments for children. 

The first treatment is Quadrimune, a strawberry-flavored combination antiretroviral treatment for infants and young children with HIV. It comes in granules that can be sprinkled on food or dissolved in milk or water. It only costs $1 a day and doesn’t need to be refrigerated either.

(READ ALSO: Quadrimune has been around since 2019, so what took them so long to authorize it?) 

The “4-in-1″ formulation was developed by the non-profit entity, Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi), and Cipla, an Indian pharmaceutical company responsible for pioneering HIV drugs in Africa. 

The other treatment is a dispersible tablet (a tab dissolved in water) called dolutegravir. It was developed by fellow Indian pharma company Macleods.

(READ ALSO: Why India is “the pharmacy of the world”)

South Africa’s approval of these two HIV therapies for children is likely to improve treatment compliance in the world’s most HIV-burdened country. More than 310,000 children—the world’s biggest number—in South Africa now are infected with HIV. They get the virus through vertical or mother-to-child transmission.

The pandemic of inequality

In 2010,  UNAIDS launched a global plan to eliminate HIV in children. A lot of progress was made by 2015, but many companies still lost steam when it came to making pediatric treatments because there was little money to be made from it. When the pandemic hit, this did not go well for South Africa. They became most affected by COVID-19 along with HIV.

This played a role in the emergence of some variants we’ve seen through the pandemic. Studies have shown that immunocompromised people, like those with untreated HIV, could become hosts for mutations of SARS-CoV-2. 

South Africa became the subject of stigma late last year when news of Omicron emerging from the country hit. As a champion of genomic sequencing over the pandemic, they would typically be the first ones to detect new variants, whether or not it came from them. 

Though they have only sequenced about 0.8% of its confirmed cases, South Africa accounts for 41% of COVID-19 sequences in the continent. And it’s not because of limited testing capabilities but due to a random sampling method. 

The World Bank ranked South Africa the world’s most unequal nation because of its prevalence of disease and stigma, among other reasons. Inequality is a pandemic of its own, manifesting not just in unequal distribution of wealth but also biases against race and ethnicity. 

Countries like South Africa and the Philippines still have a long way to go before quality healthcare is made a basic right rather than a privilege. Strawberry-flavored HIV medicine that is accessible to the masses is a baby step—literally and figuratively—towards that goal.