Zimbabwe's pharmaceutical and health care products manufacturing giant, Caps Holdings Limited, on Saturday said it will boost the production of anti-retroviral drugs this year to meet ever-increasing demand.

Group Chief Operating Officer Regis Nyaruwanga said that they were focusing on increasing the production of ARVs to about 500, 000 tablets per month.

He said last year the company sold a total of 600,000 tablets, a figure they felt was far too short of the national requirement, as it only benefited about 10,000 patients.

Nyaruwanga said the company was commissioning a new factory equipped with latest machinery, which would increase production of the drugs. This would help the country save scarce foreign currency previously used to import drugs.

Caps Pharmaceuticals currently meets only 10 percent of the country's anti-retroviral drug needs.

Zimbabwe has over 300,000 people who require anti-retroviral drugs, but only 42,000 of them are receiving treatment. The remainder have to be catered for through home-based care initiatives.

The prevalence rate for the HIV virus in Zimbabwe was down to 18.1 percent in 2006 from the previous 20.1 percent in 2005, while projections point to a reduction to a single digit rate by 2010, he said.

Source: Xinhua