The biggest mistake is to consider medicines, the primary asset for life, like any other product. The distortions of the "health market" are nothing else, the experts point out, than the inevitable fruit of a wrong choice at the origin. That of equating, in terms of patents and industrial strategies, a medicine to a mobile phone, a vaccine to a computer, a pill to a television. This is how some disturbing data can be explained, the observers suggest. For example: of the 1,393 new drugs approved between 1975 and 1999, just 13 (rl%) were intended for the treatment of tropical diseases and tuberculosis. And 9 million people fall ill from tuberculosis alone every year, 1.7 million are dead. This is not a lack of funds: the pharmaceutical industry has a turnover of nearly 400 billion euros, 25% more than the GDP of sub-Saharan Africa. But the African market is "worth" only 1′ 1% of the world drug market. In short, the Dark Continent is not profitable. On the contrary, the diseases that most affect the North of the world, the one that can most easily afford to spend on their health, they absorb the 85% on the market. The imbalance is all here: scientific research, doctors themselves say, is driven by commercial interest. It is no coincidence that among the "forgotten" diseases there are some, such as malaria and AIDS, which are a little less so, also affecting at least a small part "patient-consumers" in the North of the world. Conversely, for Chagas disease in Latin America or sleeping sickness in Cameroon, investments are in short supply. And so in developing countries 35,000 people die every day of diseases that we ignore or that we relegate, in our imagination, to past eras. From polio to malaria, from leprosy to yellow fever. The gaps in basic health care in poor countries do the rest. Those in which a single dispensary acts as a catalyst for tens of thousands of people. Not to mention the patent issue. In fact, the Trips agreements, which defend the rights of intellectual property, are also in force for medicines. And so the market for a life-saving drug can be monopolized for twenty years by whoever produced it, a policy that is useful for defending investments. But that turns out to be a boomerang for millions of people around the world who will never be able to have access to that drug (nor to a generic equivalent). Avvenire of 02/15/2008, article by PAOLO M. ALFIERI p. 3 Avvenire of 02/15/2008, article by PAOLO M. ALFIERI p. 3
