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International News Report |
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Brazil's national health-care system will stop providing
expensive drugs to treat HIV and certain other diseases in
October because the Brazilian currency has lost value against the
U.S. dollar.
The government would need an immediate infusion of $110 million to continue the drug programs, officials said. Some AIDS drugs that are produced in Brazil -- including AZT, ddI and d4T -- may continue to be available. Brazilian AIDS deaths dropped 38.7 percent between 1996 and 1998 as patients began taking protease-inhibitor-based combination treatments.
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