Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13272

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

Poor Markets, Rich Rewards: Pharmaceuticals and poor countries
The Economist 2004 Sep 3056
http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_PNVPDDQ

Abstract:

PUTTING profits before patients is not what many pharmaceutical companies would like to be known for. But that is exactly the reputation many of them earned in 2001, when 39 firms sued the South African government over changes to its patent laws to ease the supply of affordable anti-HIV medicines.

Since then, the industry has been scrambling to redeem its tarnished reputation. Many firms have agreed to make some existing drugs more accessible to developing countries; a few, such as GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis, are trying to develop new drugs for diseases which mainly afflict poor countries. …