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| International-UN-NGOs | |
| AIDS Bureaucracy Cashes In | |
| 2004-08-09 | |
Last month I traveled to Bangkok to cover the 15th World AIDS Conference. Many luminaries — Kofi Annan, Nelson Mandela, CEOs of various pharmaceutical companies, actress Ashley Judd — were there, all talking The Language of Concern and Compassion. But nobody talked seriously about a vaccine or a cure; the phantom of this opera was the prospect of actually eradicating the virus. Activists blame the U.S. government and the pharmaceutical companies. Uncle Sam, they say, underfunds condom distribution. Given the activists' antipathy to abstinence-eager Texans, it probably won't do much good to point out that the dreaded Bush administration is spending more on condoms than Clinton's ever did. This year, the U.S. Agency for International Development is expected to donate more than 500 million condoms to poor countries around the world. The "Big Pharma" story is less straightforward. Activists say the drug companies have underfunded R&D. But the truth is that the drug makers have spent tens of billions of dollars on fighting AIDS. Now, however, they are quietly pulling back. Why? Because they no longer see profits ahead. The drug companies are being pressured into basically giving away their existing anti-AIDS meds in Third World countries, home to 95% of the 38 million people infected with the virus. Even so, they are routinely vilified; the chief of Pfizer, Hank McKinnell, was booed off the stage in Bangkok. If a pharmaceutical company were to come up with an AIDS-smiting "silver bullet," Magic Johnson would gladly pay the sticker price, while everyone else would demand it free. If you're Pfizer, it's hard to make money that way. | |
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #3 the "cocktails" that kept it from being the death notice it once was in the U.S have also led to complacency among the high-risk (i.e.: gay) groups. Lack of an adequate profit motive will ineveitably postpone a vaccine. |
| Posted by: Frank G 2004-08-09 5:08:39 PM |
| #2 I'm pretty much in agreement up until the last sentence on the extended article. "...mutating into newer and more lethal forms." Not going to happen. HIV is very prone to mutation, even more than flu or the cold virus, however, that does not *increase* lethality, it *decreases* it. "New" diseases have predicatable life cycles. When they begin, they are terribly deadly, but over time, the deadlier strains are weeded out by not being xmitted as much as the less deadly strains. 150 years ago, syphillis, for example, was a horrific killer, the terror of Europe and most of the world. But over time it weakened until finally an effective treatment came along, which accelerated its weakening. With antibiotics, it just became an annoyance. HIV has already become a chronic, rather than acute disease in the US; but in the third and fourth world, it is just beginning its cycle. And there, there are disease "multipliers", that both help in its spread and lethality. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2004-08-09 5:05:09 PM |
| #1 The Debby Group make some wonderful products as well. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2004-08-09 4:53:47 PM |