Christian Laurent and colleagues, in today’s Lancet, report on the efficacy and safety of a generic fixed-dose combination of nevirapine, stavudine, and lamivudine in HIV-1-infected adults in Cameroon. Highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) has led to dramatic reductions in HIV-related morbidity and mortality in the USA and in India.1,2 The use of HAART has led to cost effective public-health programmes in countries such as Brazil, because there are now fewer episodes of illness and hospital admission.3 The cost of combination HIV-antiretroviral treatment has plummeted in the past 12 months, such that HAART can now be bought for less than US$250 a year from Cipla and other generic companies. Cipla is a drug company in Mumbai, India, that launched the first generic antiretroviral drug, zidovudine, in 1994. Since then, Cipla has launched ten different antiretroviral and fixed-dose combinations of antiretroviral drugs as single pills. Falling prices of therapy are enabling physicians in the developing world to offer triple antiretroviral regimens to greater numbers of patients, who desperately need the life-saving drugs. The safety, tolerability, and efficacy of generic antiretroviral regimens for HIV-infected Indians has been shown.4 Also there were earlier reports that generic antiretroviral drugs were successfully used in HIV infected patients in Africa.