Bad Medicine

News is how News looks. If you got bored of Shilpa Victim Shetty's tryst with "fame" or Anna Nicole Smith's, tragic as it was, death, well then go ahead, read this post.

At the risk of sounding redundant; medicine is one of the oldest industries of mankind. Well not in the contemporary meaning of the word, but something akin to a systematic labor for some useful purpose. But in the modern sense, it truly is an "industrialised" industry, where profits rule the roost.

At the heart of the medicine, or rather, pharmaceutical industry's future is a court case currently being fought in Madras, India over India's patent laws. Now here is what it is all about very briefly: In the 1970's India stopped issuing patents for medicines. This allowed its many drug producers to create generic copies of medicines still patent-protected in other countries - at a fraction of the price charged by Western drug firms. But in 1994 India signed up to the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (Trips), a deal that required all WTO member countries to grant patents on technological products, including pharmaceuticals, by 2005. Drug companies have since been queuing up to patent their brands in India. Up to 9,000 patents await examination. A big pharmaceutical company, Novartis, is now arguing that India's requirement for drugs to be new and innovative is not in line with the TRIPS.

But here's the catch: Owing to its patent laws earlier India became a "pharmacy for the world's poor", providing generic variations of expensive drugs for diseases like AIDS at very cheap prices. A geneva based NGO, MSF (medicines sans frontiers) says generic manufacturers have helped bring the cost of AIDS treatment down from $10,000 per patient per year in 2000, to just $130 now. Now the geo-political spread of AIDS is such that its the worlds poorest living in Africa, India and so on that will be affected most by this case.

Novartis, however, points out that nations are entitled to over-ride patent protection in the case of a national emergency. However, the countries that are trying to issue compulsory licences, which in some instances have been some of the more powerful middle-income countries, come under enormous pressure, and that pressure is noticed. Brazil has threatened compulsory licences three times. The drug companies have jumped up and down, and [the US] Congress has threatened to withdraw Brazil's trade preferences. So much for the humanisation of WTO.

At the face of it, I am not totally against Novartis. After all they have invested millions of dollars in making these medicines and if nothing, they at least deserve the rights over their intellectual property. After all it was someone's hard work.Or is it this simple?. Rather, this is more so a case of twisting some clauses in TRIPS agreement and pseudo-imperialist-capitalism. Like presenting medicines with just slight variations over the older ones as patentable.

And at the heart of it all, is the scary picture of capitalism that has emerged. The one where big companies form bigger lobbies and influence government decisions in their favour at the pretext of pseudo-intellectualism. Where the capital P is profit not people. And where company policies might as well be renamed as double standards.

Don't get me wrong. I am not denying them their intellectual credit or the amount of effort put in by them to make life saving drugs. Neither am i morally defending generic manufacturers. But the world, as we see it has such an intrinsic complexity that sometime arguments which are more irrational and humane are more sense also. Sometimes we should step back from viewing the world with a business, scientific or intellectual perspective and just have humane common sense damn it!