Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14649

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: report

The indifferent industry: Big Pharma, essential medicines and Africa’s sick
: Forum for African Investigative Reporters (FAIR) 2008 Jan
http://www.mo.be/en/article/indifferent-industry

Abstract:

The large pharmaceutical companies – often referred to as Big Pharma – hold on to a policy of protecting their patents, the high prices and corresponding huge profits. This stubbornness collides with advertised commitment to fight Aids in Africa and hampers more extensive distribution for Aids treatment. This is all the more grim since many of these medicines were tested on African volunteers – the very people who will never see the drugs they helped develop.

As a consequence of this situation, millions of Africans in despair are tempted to rely on quack
remedies such as pesticide injections, Chinese vitaminsthat result in kidney damage, and a plethora of immune boosters advertised to cure Aids. Strategies to break the monopoly of Big Pharma and
their expensive brand cures depend largely on the pressure exerted by civil society groups to allow the production of generic versions of essential drugs.

PR talk and India
Advertised commitment by some pharmaceutical industries ‘to help develop local manufacturing’ of ARVs seems disingenuous. Local manufacturers have not been and will most probably not be able in the foreseeable future to produce a viable quantity or quality of ARV medication compatible with World Health Organisation (WHO) standards. The cost of importation of raw materials – sometimes also patented – and the condition of the infrastructure are not the only reasons for this failure…