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Rising costs for drugs is threatening Brazil's ability to provide free AIDS medication to all patients needing it, according to a study that will be presented at the United Nations next week.
Experts say Brazil's AIDS-treatment program, hailed as a model by the U.N., has reached a crossroads due to the increased funding needs. "There are two choices: Either the government spends more on AIDS and less on other diseases, or the quality of the AIDS treatment suffers," said Alexandre Grangeiro, a former director of Brazil's anti-AIDS program who helped develop the study. The study will be presented at an Extraordinary Session of the U.N. General Assembly on HIV and AIDS from May 30 to June 2. Brazil's AIDS treatment program has been praised by the U.N. as an example for other developing countries fighting to control the deadly epidemic. Thanks to the treatment program and aggressive prevention efforts, Brazil has largely managed to stabilize the epidemic. The death rate among men has fallen from 15.1 deaths per 100,000 in 1995 to 8.8 per 100,000 in 2004. Between 1980 and 2004 171,923 Brazilians have died of AIDS. But as the virus becomes more resistant and patients require newer drugs, the program also has become more expensive. According to the study, the cost per patient jumped 50 percent between 2004 and 2005, from 4,000 reais (US$ 1,800) a year to 6,000 reais (US$ 2,700). At the same time, costs for AIDS drugs all manufactured in the United States or Europe grew to nearly 1 billion reais (US$ 440 million), up from 700 million reais (US$ 311 million) the year before. The Brazilian program was significantly cheaper in the 1990s, when the country produced generic versions of AIDS drugs patented before it signed its intellectual property law in 1996. Since then, Brazil has occasionally threatened to break patents on grounds it faces a national health emergency, which is allowed under World Trade Organization rules. But so far, the government has reached agreements for big discounts from producers and has not broken a patent. Now Brazil has no generic equivalents ready to use, and its threats to break patents have lost their punch, said Grangeiro, who is now the director of the Sao Paulo state Health Institute. Mariângela Simões, the head of the government's anti-AIDS program, said the government had made a decision to contain costs solely through negotiation. "The government is committed to following the law that says it will provide anti-AIDS medicines to people who need them," Simões said. "Whether that affects treatment for other diseases is a question of the Health Ministry's priorities." Pravda - www.pravda.ru
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The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.
Is money used for red tape, bureaucracy or corruption ?
That would be the only explanation of rising costs !
Again this is what you call the CUSTO BRAZIL !!!!