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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 1136

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

Boseley S.
Guardian on WHO/HAI drug pricing report: Pricing policies exposed
The Guardian 2003 May 21


Full text:

The World Health Organisation is to publish a survey of the prices of medicines, exposing the secrecy of the pharmaceutical firms over pricing and revealing the high cost of health to people in developing countries.

Prices are critical in the developing world because, in 90% of cases, medicines are bought by individuals, not the state. Sometimes, when a person is ill, family members may have to sell their assets to try to keep him or her alive.

Healthcare in poorer countries badly needs improving, but the price of medicines is proving the biggest obstacle, says a new WHO and Health Action International study.

It shows that a full course of antibiotics to cure simple pneumonia in a poor country can cost a month’s wages for the lowest-paid unskilled state worker, compared with two or three hours’ wages in a rich country. A Tanzanian would have to work 500 hours to pay for tuberculosis treatment, a Swiss person just 90 minutes.

The study says that pharmaceutical companies “infrequently” set prices according to the ability to pay. “Changes in trade regulations and particularly rules relating to intellectual property, such as patent rights, may also affect the international prices and availability of medicines. Prices thus need to be monitored,” the survey says.

Patents on new medicines such as Aids drugs are not the only factor raising the price, says the survey. Duties, taxes, mark-ups, distribution costs and dispensing fees can regularly put 30% to 45% on the price.

Some commonly used medicines have been found to be more expensive in developing countries, it says.

The WHO manual lists 30 medicines that should be monitored, for conditions that include Aids, malaria and the chronic diseases of affluent countries such as asthma and diabetes.

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909