Where is the surprise, I ponder. Essentially the flow of “aid” or assistance from rich countries is in two parts of government money: channeled through charities and NGOs or partial subsidies of the pharmaceutical companies, or through direct research and development money from private companies.
Cures for known diseases are not a big money-maker for the pharmaceutical companies. Medications and preventative materials are old, tested goods and “generic” merchandise. Patents and other intellectual property rights have long expired for medications for malaria and the like, and thus from a business point of view, those products are either generic or very low profit. Moreover, planners sit in air-conditioned offices of modern cities, sip bottled water and pay the weekly wage of an African patient for a triple cappuccino and a piece of bread. Their daily dilemma is to choose between two different luxuries to pacify their boredom. Worries about basic needs such as clean water, sanitation or inoculation for locally “eradicated” diseases is a remote concern in, say, Copenhagen or Atlanta. Thus the focus is on fame and fortune--if a miracle drug is found for HIV/AIDS, heart attack, cancer or other diseases, there is a large, rich customer base in high-stress, urban living areas.
Pharmaceutical companies are under pressure to produce new, miracle drugs that are “exciting” and can be sold for high margins. That will keep capital markets and shareholders happy as executives can keep the corporate jet and golf club perks. The commodity ingredients business (say, vitamins, pain killers, cough syrups, and most vaccines) have low sales margins and are not of interest to major drug companies. The “value” of these companies is more focused on what capital markets dictate, and focuses on their high-margin, patented products sold to customers. Saving lives tends to be just a by-product.
Developing countries with fluid regulatory regimes serve as proving grounds for tests and experimental regimes in research phases of new products. To avoid high costs and unquantifiable litigation risks, the first phases of human testing of new medications are often done in countries that have a large number of desperate candidates and lack strict controls and supervision, reporting or expensive labour to run the experiments that take up to 6 or 7 years to produce a sufficient body of evidence to justify a second phase of human testing back home.
In local terms, it appears to be a tsunami of resources aimed at a specific disease, since even tens of millions of dollars might double or quadruple the heath care budget of a small African country. But it is a paltry sum in places where it will hardly pay for lunch at a political convention, a single malpractice lawsuit or what lobbyists bill their clients in a single month, and where the aim of the private sector donors tend to be about business, and where government charity money is recycled back to local employees and aimed to pacify a particular class of their population.
‘Let them eat cake’ seems to be the thinking of the urban dweller who consumes 20 times the energy that an African consumes: why don’t those with malaria or yellow fever, or in need of clean water or sanitary sewage, just borrow the money and buy the medicine and equipment they need from Wal-Mart! Don’t they have credit cards, home equity loans, or payday loan outfits in Africa?
Please e-mail PostGlobal if you'd like to receive an email notification when PostGlobal sends out a new question.
Email This Post to a Friend | Del.icio.us | Digg | Facebook | Email the Author
