In praise of Bill Gates
There's something drastically wrong when we have to turn to Bill Gates to point out the deficiencies of the free market. But who else can the poor of the world turn to for cures to the diseases which help keep them in poverty? There is no money in third-world diseases. Big pharmaceuticals focus on drugs which alleviate the diseases of the rich, many self-inflicted like heart-attacks, strokes and cigarette or diet-caused cancers. Diseases of the rich generally kill us in middle or older age. In 1991, nearly a million Americans died of heart disease. The biggest disease of the poor, malaria kills between one and two million people a year, taking many of its victims as children. But while heart disease is under siege from the research and development community, backed by the deep pockets of the profit-driven pharmaceuticals, malaria research has languished. Between 1975 and 1999, only four of the almost 1,400 new drugs developed worldwide were antimalarials, and all were at least in part the products of publicly funded research, according to a report from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies 2004. Yet 350-500 million people are infected with malaria each year, primarily in Africa. In turn, that has a massive economic impact on the Too-Hard Continent, cutting the region’s gross domestic product by about $12 billion annually.
Bill Gates doesn't pull his punches. “For far too long, malaria has been a forgotten epidemic,” he says on the website of the Gates Foundation, an organisation he set up with his wife, Melinda, to try to change these grim statistics. “It’s a disgrace that the world has allowed malaria deaths to double in the last 20 years, when so much more could be done to stop the disease.” The Foundation has produced a report showing that anti-malaria research totaled just $323 million in 2004 – less than 0.3% of total health research spending worldwide, and "far less than the amount needed." The Gates Foundation has nearly doubled that figure this year, giving anti-malaria initiatives an additional $258 million. That figure was in turn dwarfed by George Bush's commitment of $1.2 billion to anti-malaria programs in July this year, and the public-private parnership, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has secured $4.4 billion US dollars of funding to fight the big three diseases of the poor. While it appears that malaria is at last emerging from the gloom of obscurity, it's not the private sector that deserves praise. The market most certainly did not provide.
In rich countries, research in HIV/AIDS drugs has progressed to the point where the disease is no longer an automatic death sentence. Contracting HIV is still life-threatening, and treatment is expensive, but the disease has been brought low, demoted from the certain killer of the eighties to a new phase as a severe ongoing illness which can kill. But that's a benefit of being born in the West. AIDS has decimated Africa and is extending its reach into the rest of the developing world. Dampened in the West, it rages in full force throughout the poor South, killing three million worldwide - 75% of those in sub-Saharan Africa. Most of the dead could have lived for much longer, if not for the obstructionism of the pharmaceuticals. The cost of drug development, concerns over their intellectual property and the almighty profit motive has led big pharmas to abandon the dying poor in favour of the dying rich. In 2001, South Africa forced 39 pharmas to see reason and back down from a lawsuit over the generic copying of brand-name drugs, a move widely seen as a victory of principles over profit. But the South African government has been notably sluggish in seeing the need for anti-retroviral drugs, and has previously refused to acknowledge the link between HIV and AIDS.
There are positive developments. As developing countries like India rise out of poverty, defying all odds, tariffs and corruption, many are investing in the diseases endemic to their population. India has been billed as a biotech giant in waiting, and Bangladesh is on the move too, establishing Beacon Pharma as the first local high-tech pharmaceutical. At present, Bangladesh has historically been almost 100 per cent dependent on the import of high-tech anti-cancer drugs, hormones, vaccines, and insulin. Across the border, Shantha Biotechnics developed India's first genetically-engineered Hepatitis B vaccine and started selling it in 1997. While Africa's biotech industry is tiny, there are patches of hope. South Africa's AIDS Vaccine Initiative is trialling two vaccines. But rather tellingly, it's the first country in the world trialling a vaccine against the HIV-1 C subtype, found most commonly in Africa. In the West, the most common HIV strain is subtype B and so, once again, most Western research has been directed towards curing the rich.
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Some critics doubt that Gates' about-face march into philanthropy is genuine. But he's only the latest in a long line of ruthless tycoons like Rockerfeller and industrialist-idealists like Carnegie who have softened into giving as their personal extinction approaches.
---
Interestingly, Western afflictions such as whiplash aren't as popular in many other countries. Research suggests chronic whiplash may largely psychosomatic, and that car-crash victims in countries in which the concept of whiplash isn't as widely publicised report lower head and neck pain following the crash.
There's something drastically wrong when we have to turn to Bill Gates to point out the deficiencies of the free market. But who else can the poor of the world turn to for cures to the diseases which help keep them in poverty? There is no money in third-world diseases. Big pharmaceuticals focus on drugs which alleviate the diseases of the rich, many self-inflicted like heart-attacks, strokes and cigarette or diet-caused cancers. Diseases of the rich generally kill us in middle or older age. In 1991, nearly a million Americans died of heart disease. The biggest disease of the poor, malaria kills between one and two million people a year, taking many of its victims as children. But while heart disease is under siege from the research and development community, backed by the deep pockets of the profit-driven pharmaceuticals, malaria research has languished. Between 1975 and 1999, only four of the almost 1,400 new drugs developed worldwide were antimalarials, and all were at least in part the products of publicly funded research, according to a report from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies 2004. Yet 350-500 million people are infected with malaria each year, primarily in Africa. In turn, that has a massive economic impact on the Too-Hard Continent, cutting the region’s gross domestic product by about $12 billion annually.
Bill Gates doesn't pull his punches. “For far too long, malaria has been a forgotten epidemic,” he says on the website of the Gates Foundation, an organisation he set up with his wife, Melinda, to try to change these grim statistics. “It’s a disgrace that the world has allowed malaria deaths to double in the last 20 years, when so much more could be done to stop the disease.” The Foundation has produced a report showing that anti-malaria research totaled just $323 million in 2004 – less than 0.3% of total health research spending worldwide, and "far less than the amount needed." The Gates Foundation has nearly doubled that figure this year, giving anti-malaria initiatives an additional $258 million. That figure was in turn dwarfed by George Bush's commitment of $1.2 billion to anti-malaria programs in July this year, and the public-private parnership, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has secured $4.4 billion US dollars of funding to fight the big three diseases of the poor. While it appears that malaria is at last emerging from the gloom of obscurity, it's not the private sector that deserves praise. The market most certainly did not provide.
In rich countries, research in HIV/AIDS drugs has progressed to the point where the disease is no longer an automatic death sentence. Contracting HIV is still life-threatening, and treatment is expensive, but the disease has been brought low, demoted from the certain killer of the eighties to a new phase as a severe ongoing illness which can kill. But that's a benefit of being born in the West. AIDS has decimated Africa and is extending its reach into the rest of the developing world. Dampened in the West, it rages in full force throughout the poor South, killing three million worldwide - 75% of those in sub-Saharan Africa. Most of the dead could have lived for much longer, if not for the obstructionism of the pharmaceuticals. The cost of drug development, concerns over their intellectual property and the almighty profit motive has led big pharmas to abandon the dying poor in favour of the dying rich. In 2001, South Africa forced 39 pharmas to see reason and back down from a lawsuit over the generic copying of brand-name drugs, a move widely seen as a victory of principles over profit. But the South African government has been notably sluggish in seeing the need for anti-retroviral drugs, and has previously refused to acknowledge the link between HIV and AIDS.
There are positive developments. As developing countries like India rise out of poverty, defying all odds, tariffs and corruption, many are investing in the diseases endemic to their population. India has been billed as a biotech giant in waiting, and Bangladesh is on the move too, establishing Beacon Pharma as the first local high-tech pharmaceutical. At present, Bangladesh has historically been almost 100 per cent dependent on the import of high-tech anti-cancer drugs, hormones, vaccines, and insulin. Across the border, Shantha Biotechnics developed India's first genetically-engineered Hepatitis B vaccine and started selling it in 1997. While Africa's biotech industry is tiny, there are patches of hope. South Africa's AIDS Vaccine Initiative is trialling two vaccines. But rather tellingly, it's the first country in the world trialling a vaccine against the HIV-1 C subtype, found most commonly in Africa. In the West, the most common HIV strain is subtype B and so, once again, most Western research has been directed towards curing the rich.
---
Some critics doubt that Gates' about-face march into philanthropy is genuine. But he's only the latest in a long line of ruthless tycoons like Rockerfeller and industrialist-idealists like Carnegie who have softened into giving as their personal extinction approaches.
---
Interestingly, Western afflictions such as whiplash aren't as popular in many other countries. Research suggests chronic whiplash may largely psychosomatic, and that car-crash victims in countries in which the concept of whiplash isn't as widely publicised report lower head and neck pain following the crash.
posted by Doug @ 11/27/2005 03:27:00 pm
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