Interesting article on the conflict between profits and health

Someone forwarded me the following article from Asia Times Online. It deals with a struggle within the World Health Organization (as provoked by the US government) over whether countries should be able to circumvent intellectual property rights and produce low-cost generic drugs in order to deal with the health crises they face. It's as direct a conflict as you can get between those who view government as the protector of corporate profits and those who view it as the guarantor of public well being.

Pharmaceutical companies explain that the cost of their drugs is the direct result of the amount they spend on R&D. The irony is that a lot of their research is done with public funding at public universities. The high costs also reflect the tremendous amount of money spent marketing the drugs they develop. Also, the decisions on what drugs to R&D isn't based on public health needs, but on expectations of profit.

The conflict between private wealth and public health is the same we see here in the US, where the pharmaceutical and insurance industries dictate public policy, to the detriment of our health as a nation. To me, it is an issue of morality and social justice: how can we justify the amount of human suffering that is being created in order to feed the ever-expanding coffers of private companies?

Anyway, the article is interesting on many levels, including the way the US (in service of corporations) tries to control international bodies and bully its critics.


World health: A lethal dose of US politics
By Dylan C Williams

BANGKOK - When World Health Organization (WHO) director general Lee Jong-wook died of a cerebral hemorrhage last month before the start of the United Nations agency's annual World Health Assembly, the world's most prominent public-health official was arguably of a conflicted mind.

The WHO veteran was caught in the middle of an intensifying global debate over how to reconcile intellectual-property protection with the pressing public-health need to expand access to expensive life-saving medicines, a hot-button issue that has sharply divided WHO member states along developed- and developing-country lines.

An Asia Times Online investigation reveals that at the time of his death, Lee, a South Korean national, had closely aligned himself with the US government and by association US corporate interests, often to the detriment of the WHO's most vital commitments and positions, including its current drive to promote the production and marketing of affordable generic antiretroviral drugs for millions of poor infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which can cause AIDS.

Read the full article