The Third World Guinea Pig

I am really at a loss for the right words to start this blog post. I don't know how much to write, what all to write about, and maybe even express my right sentiment. All I know is that ever since I started making sense of the injustice in this world, most of which I realize we see but do not even realize, this issue has angered and embittered me.

There has been a issue raging for many years about the generic AIDS medication that is distributed to aids patients in the third world nations, particularly in Africa. The big issue raised is of something called intellectual property rights, which the big western pharma giants raise all the time, saying that they should be allowed to charge a premium on the AIDS medication they provide to the African AIDS patients, because they have spent many millions on its research, and they should be rightly paid for it. That is all fine and dandy, but what it does is that their greed effectively takes away this essential cocktail of drugs from many of these patients, because they can't afford it. The generic drug makers, especially from India, have been able to provide cheap AIDS cocktails to the AIDS patients, but this too gets the goat of Big Pharma.

In the United States, where the Big Pharma has forever influenced government policy, the focus had shifted to R&D on lifestyle drugs a long time ago. The most popular lifestyle drug beyond doubt is Viagra, the drug promising to wipe out your impotence. Unfortunately, very few people actually care to know the long term repercussions of this shifting focus away from research on lifesaving drugs and medicines, and most western media only view this as an opportunity to invest in pharma stocks and companies.

The problem is that the developed world is only a small percentage of the entire world's population, and most unfortunately, they control most of the capital, especially the one that goes into the research and development of lifesaving drugs. Now the rest of the world, especially the vast majority of the poor, still suffers from the same diseases, and millions perish in the process, that the developed world has managed to more or less eradicate from their society. Since North America and Europe constitute the largest markets for Big Pharma, naturally their attention shifts to new diseases in these societies, such as male impotence, baldness, depression, obesity and heart diseases. Adding to this trend is the fact that there are very few government supported medical R&D in any part of the world that continue to fund studies into creating/improving drugs that help much of the third world. Even third world pharma companies, especially the Indian ones, while improving their R&D profile, are best at making generic copies of drugs developed in western labs. Even that is changing, because India is slowly being suckered into opening its market for every damn western business practice in the name of free trade, and pharma is no exception. Taking over Indian companies effectively shuts down one opposition pharmaseutical companies from the west face in the now highly lucrative Indian market and elsewhere, and they get to take over their patents, and at the same time cut down challenges to their own patents.

To take this ridiculous situation a notch higher, while western companies do not make drugs for the third world, that sure does not stop them from using the third world as guinea pigs. This century is replete with examples of men, women and children belonging to some of the poorest parts of the world being given drugs as test rats, most often for money, and in many cases, without even telling them. India has been no exception.

This recent news about hundreds of Guatemalans, belonging to one of the poorest countries in South-Central America, suing the American Government for using them as guinea pigs, when they were intentionally infected with syphilis to study the effects of the disease on humans. Of course, when the facts are stacked against you, and lying won't clear you, you take to admission, apologize and promise to undo the injustice, as the American Government now is doing.

This is just one of the many, many experiments that drug companies have done on the poor and unsuspecting peoples of this world. Yet, governments across the world, especially in the third world, are not coming forward with the alacrity and urgency to take forward the R&D in research on essential lifesaving drugs for the third world population. Millions will continue to die while the issues that will occupy our minds will be intellectual property, margins and profits.