The absurd notion that taxpayers should give money to the drugs
industry as an incentive to develop a new generation of antibiotics demonstrates
how a handful of corporations have their proverbial fingers round society’s
throat.
Using fairly sensational language to set the alarm bells
ringing, the government's chief medical officer Professor Dame Sally Davis says
the threat posed by antibiotic resistance is on a level compared to global terrorism.
Actually, the threat posed by Big Pharma is worse.
Big Pharma – the handful of corporations that control the
global industry – haven’t produced a new range of antibiotics for 20 years
because there’s little profit in selling this type of drug.
During that time, the over-prescription of antibiotics by
health practitioners and their intensive use in livestock farming to make meat
cheaper has spawned new bacterial strains that are immune to existing drugs. Others
have become so difficult to treat that they kill some 25,000 Europeans
yearly.
So Professor Davis is warning that without new antibiotics
routine operations could become endangered by infections that cannot be
treated, for example. But leaving it to Big Pharma will prove as dangerous as
the new bacterial infections themselves.
In 2010, the top 10 pharmaceuticals had astronomical
revenues totalling over $500 billion. Much of it comes from drugs we don’t
need and from denying developing countries the right to sell generic
equivalents at lower prices.
Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Pharma reveals how
companies run bad trials on their own drugs, which distort and exaggerate the
benefits. Data that doesn’t support the results is buried. Meanwhile, the
medical profession is beholden to the same corporations and, he argues, are
actually educated by the drugs industry.
As far back as 2002, an article in the British Medical Journal accused the industry of extending the
boundaries of treatable disease to expand markets for new products. A decade
later, the BMJ has launched a campaign entitled 'Too Much Medicine',
saying: “There is growing evidence that many people are over-diagnosed and
overtreated for a wide range of conditions, such as prostate and thyroid
cancers, asthma, and chronic kidney disease.”
Former editor Richard Smith, who now works for a health care
group, says that
only 11% of 3,000 health interventions have good evidence to
support them, with 80% of new drugs copies of old ones.
When it comes to holding on to patents to enforce
monopolies, Big Pharma has an appalling record. Dylan Gray’s film “Fire In the Blood” documents how the
corporations and governments blocked access to low-cost AIDS drugs – causing
millions of unnecessary deaths.
He
says: “At the industry's behest, governments in the US and Europe use a
dizzying variety of trade mechanisms, threats of sanctions and so on to curtail
supplies of affordable medicine in the global south. The potential impact of
these measures in human terms is nothing less than cataclysmic.”
There are solutions we could pursue if the profit motive was
not the main driver. First, over-prescribing has to stop. Doctors have to put
patients first instead and abandon the quick-fix approach as well as misplaced
loyalties to drug firms.
Secondly, we should note that 84% of worldwide funding for drug discovery
research comes from government and public sources, against just 12% from pharma
companies. Apparently, researchers have already discovered new antibiotics but
haven’t got the funds to develop them.
So
the science is there. However, the technology and capacity to turn knowledge
into products is in the hands of the top 10 – Pfizer, Astra Zeneca, Johnson
& Johnson, Novartis, Bayer, F Hoffman-La Roche, Merck, Sanofi,
GlaxoSmithKline and Abbot.
That’s
what has to change. Global health cannot be determined by a handful of
profit-driven corporations. Giving them funds, especially at a time when
austerity is cutting key services, is a shocking idea. Instead, Big Pharma has
to come into common ownership and no effort spared to develop drugs that
benefit the sick and not shareholders.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
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