Geneva — In September 2023, the US corporation Danaher, which owns diagnostics maker Cepheid, announced a price reduction of the primary GeneXpert test used to diagnose tuberculosis (TB), from US$9.98 (R181,54) to $7.97 (R144,98), amid pressure from TB activists.
Since then, officials from the Ministries of Health of Sierra Leone, Ghana, Ukraine, Belarus and several other low- and middle-income countries have written to Danaher, requesting that the price of the tests for HIV, hepatitis and drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB),—currently priced at $14.90 (R271,04) per test cartridge—also be lowered to no more than $7.97 (R144,98).
“My country has a significantly high number of people living with HIV and hepatitis, many of whom live in remote areas where point-of-care Xpert tests are a must to avoid considerable delays in receiving results from far away testing labs,” said Dr Stephen Ayisi Addo, Programme Manager of the National AIDS/STI Control Programme of Ghana. “Rapid turnaround times are particularly important to start timely treatment in case of infants, children, as well as pregnant and breastfeeding women. But the high price of your cartridges continues to be a barrier for us to scale up testing.
We ask Danaher to reduce the price of the Xpert HIV, hepatitis C and B viral load test cartridges to no more than $7.97 (R144,98), the same price as the Xpert TB test. We can’t accept that we must pay double the price for a test that can help us to diagnose people with HIV .
