Cashing in on swine flu

Swine flu is to be avoided – unless you own shares in the pharmaceutical industry that is. The world’s second biggest drug company GlaxoSmithKline is expected to reap around £3 billion by January from sales of its swine flu vaccine and its anti-viral drug Relenza.

Aware of the widespread hostility to its exploitation of disease to make ever fatter profits, GSK recently went to great lengths to put a nice face on its operations. Andrew Witty, its new chief executive, has announced announced a new strategy whereby the company “would help the poor”. Medical charities have pointed out, however, that lowering prices would undercut companies that produce generic drugs, thereby leaving the poorer countries still at the mercy of Big Pharma.

The swine flu pandemic is an example of not just how the pharmaceuticals cash in on disease but why profit-centred research and production actually makes it impossible to tackle diseases in a systematic way. This is demonstrated by two US scientists, Christopher Walsh and Michael Fischbach, writing in the Scientific American magazine.

They point to the challenges in discovering cures for the new “super bugs” which have arisen in recent years. Not only swine flu, but the lethal MRSA are bugs which have emerged from a combination of modern medical treatments and the evolutionary process of bacterium. Like MRSA, the “hospital bug” which caused 19,000 deaths in the US in 2007 alone, the H1N1 strain, which causes swine flu, does not respond to antibiotic treatment.

Walsh and Fischbach say that “modern medicine is losing the war against disease-causing bacteria that were once considered vanquished, and new approaches to discovering and creating antibiotics are needed to turn the tide.” They add:

Unfortunately, all the antibiotics sold today are blunt instruments; they not only kill the pathogens that cause infections, they also kill the helpful bacterial mutualists that inhabit our gut. In some cases this eradication of a patients gut micro flora clears the way for a different strain of bacteria, such as clostridium difficile, to multiply and cause a new, ‘secondary’ infection, that can sometimes be more dangerous than the first.

A new strategy of developing “narrow spectrum” drugs that target the pathogen more accurately and leaving other bacteria intact is needed, they say. But the financial incentive for Big Pharma is missing because such drugs would have limited applications and require rapid diagnostics, they “might be economically unattractive to drug companies”.

Walsh and Fischbach explain that the urgent need to discover new antibiotic classes is a complex process requiring novel discovery strategies. There was a “golden age” of antibiotic discovery from the 1930s-1960s, but such discoveries ground to a halt. One reason, they claim, were the small profit margins in antibiotic research, “compared with so-called lifestyle drugs” as well as the challenge of finding brand new antibiotic classes.

The spread of pandemics like swine flu is seen by many as the result of the over-use of antibiotics in factory farming as well as in medical treatment in general. The blunt instrument approach, in which millions become unpaid and unconscious guinea pigs, yields bigger profits than the innovative strategy and precise targeting that is urgently needed.

The outbreak of swine flu has led to a race between the drug giants, GSK and rival Hoffmann-LaRoche, which is earning vast profits on its drug Tamiflu. During the bird flu epidemic of 2005, the US government purchased $2 billon worth of Tamiflu doses. Some 50 million doses of were prescribed for it before and during the bird flu epidemic. Dangerous side effects were noted amongst Japanese teenagers. The antiviral was developed by a company whose chairman was gung-ho Bush ally Donald Rumsfeld, by the way.

Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary

Profit comes before public health

The World Health Organisation has increased its assessment of the risk of a swine flu pandemic to the second highest level, yet not one politician has spoken about the underlying reasons for the outbreak.

There is a simple explanation: swine fever is the unavoidable by-product of the industrialised system of livestock production run by global corporations for the benefit of shareholders under conditions where public health is second to profitability.

For months, citizens in the community of La Gloria, in the Mexican State of Veracruz, have asked for help to deal with an outbreak of a respiratory disease which they were convinced was caused by pollution from a local pig factory. It was set up by Granja Carroll, a subsidiary of the US company Smithfield Foods, the world's largest pork producer.

Smithfield denied the illness had any connection with its operations and community activists were threatened and arrested. But on 27 April 2009, it emerged that the first case of swine flu diagnosed was a 4-year old boy from La Gloria.

There had also been an outbreak of avian flu amongst flocks of industrialised chickens, held in a factory about 50 kilometres from La Gloria, owned by Mexico’s largest meat producer Granjas Bachoco. It was not made public because of fears about what it would do the meat export business.

As this dangerous combined virus was transmitted to humans, it occurred to me, and I’m sure to you too, that the pigs and chickens are having their revenge for the miserable, inhumane treatment they suffer. But of course, pigs and chickens don’t have any control over the myriad illnesses that affect them because of the conditions in which they are held. That is why they are continually pumped full of antibiotics, which only increases the risk of new viruses taking hold.

The organisation GRAIN, which monitors the impact of industrialised agriculture, explains that government researchers have known for many years that the conditions of factory farming create the risk of new genetic mutations which can cross the species gap to infect humans.

But no attempt has been made to change production methods and we are simply meant to accept that this is the price we have to pay for cheap meat. Tell that to the parents of the 23-month-old child who died in Texas yesterday – and those who will die, however many it turns out to be, as medical services battle to protect populations.

Smithfield’s total sales in 2007 were $11.4 billion. As well as their operations in the US and Mexico, they have plants in Poland, France and China. Their website has pictures of shiny hams and smiling “moms” and opens with the sentiment: “Food is unforgettable memories. Food is pure joy. Food is family and friends.”

But for Smithfield, food is actually 250 male hogs crammed into a space the size of a very small flat. And millions of gallons of excrement lying in toxic pools near to communities across the United States and, of course, in La Gloria. A 2007 article in Rolling Stone magazine claimed claimed that if Smithfield dealt with the pollution safely, they would actually make a loss.

What the giant meat companies do is not “animal husbandry”. It is a ruthless industrial process taking pigs from birth to profit as fast and as cheap as possible. And those UK pig farmers who employ traditional methods, keeping pigs outdoors in arcs, are under continual pressure to intensify production so the supermarkets can push down costs and increase their profits even more.

The urgent choice facing all humanity is clear. Do you we continue to allow the corporations, in every sector from food, to energy, to pharmaceuticals, to threaten our lives and our health in pursuit of profit? Or do we take control of the processes that support life – food, energy and health care - and start to work with nature in an entirely different, not-for-profit, way? In my view, this is a no brainer.

Penny Cole
Environment editor