generalspeaking

Pipe Dreams and Other Imponderables

If there is one industry that can be viewed with some measure of contempt, I would personally assay that it is the pharmaceutical industry. Whose sole interest in producing a product for human consumption is their bottom line. Their bald attempts to secure ever more of the pharmaceutical market share, to even invent, with the willing assistance of the medical community, new "diseases" or frailties in the human condition that can be handily ameliorated with their newly-released drugs should elicit nothing but contempt from any thinking individual.

The giant international pharmaceuticals claim they must make a hefty profit to enable them to re-invest in their research laboratories for ever greater benefit of humankind. They portray themselves as corporately caring, as driven to discover through their research capabilities, fuelled by their huge profits, benefits to us, to ensure we live longer, more disease-free or -controlled lives. Carefully controlling and manipulating their valued formula-protective patents.

In the interests of which they will minimally alter formulae to produce similar drugs they can then re-patent, further protecting their formulas from adoption and replication by other pharmaceutical companies whose specialty is producing generic drugs, cheaper and more economically accessible to the consumer. Their public relations ploys, their funding of university laboratory researchers for self-serving outcomes is lamentable, but reflects the free market system.

Their advertising, directly to the consuming public, claiming to have the winning formulas to enable people afflicted with various types of illnesses, diseases, or even newly-discovered social ailments which at any other time are considered to be normal bodily or aging processes, are contemptible beyond imagining. They victimize the vulnerable, just as surely as fraudulent medical practitioners or illegal purveyors of unregulated drugs purporting to be miracle cures do.

Yet here is an altruistic group of medical practitioners who have set up an initiative called "Incentives for Global Health", a non-profit organization that has thought up a proposal to alter incentives for pharmaceutical companies, to try to entice them, through government guarantees of pay-back, to invest in new research. The sad fact is that 90% of money spent on medical research is targeted on 10% of conditions, those that impact on the populations of the developed world.

For it is that global demographic that has the means to pay for the pharmaceuticals. While 10% of funding for pharmaceutical-medical research is used to target 90% of "the global burden of disease", as identified by the World Health Organization. That "global burden of disease" is identified as various types of diseases that ravage the populations of under-developed, emerging economies of the world. That global demographic that hasn't the wherewithal to pay for expensive drugs.

Sounds good, really. Encourage and entice huge international corporations to become just a trifle altruistic. They will still be paid in the end, and if they co-operate they will be involved in producing life-saving antidotes for millions of the world's disease-afflicted. Sounds good, really good. And one can only applaud the humanitarian empathy and goal-setting of people like University of Calgary Aiden Hollis, professor of economics, and Thomas Pogge, professor of philosophy and international affairs at Yale, who unveiled this radical new proposal.

They estimate that roughly $6-billion annually would suffice to enable the Fund they envision to provide a workable incentive for drug companies to sign in on their deal, to produce drugs that target the diseases of the poor. Except, actually, wouldn't it be far more intelligent to target the reasons and the conditions that lead to these dreadful life-wasting diseases?

To opt for and work toward improving the living conditions of people existing in squalid, miserable conditions? To work directly with local agencies in those countries - bypassing their too-often corrupt governments - to improve those impossible living conditions that generate, through endemic poverty and ignorance the opportunity for those diseases to fester and ruin the lives of the forgotten miserable of the world?

To fundamentally educate those wretched communities living in nasty, unlivable conditions. To teach them hygiene methods whereby they do not defecate in the very waters that they drink, nor allow their cattle to do so. To enable them to produce potable water by very simple, yet proven techniques that are cost-effective and efficient. To educate the parents and the children, and give them primary health care.

The $6-billion annual investment might go a very long way to achieving that kind of liberation for people whose governments are simply disinterested, or incapable, or both. Teach people to avoid contamination, to avoid the conditions that produce dire illnesses, rather than give them the means by which they may live with those conditions.

Something like teaching a man to fish for himself, rather than handing him a fish someone else has caught.

Labels: Environment, Human Fallibility, World Crises

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, September 18, 2008