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To: LindyBill who wrote (85733)	11/12/2004 11:06:21 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793907

Cheap drugs help no one if they're not effective By Collin Levey Special to The Seattle Times There are certain topics in public life where the stakes are so high that told-you-sos are inappropriate. So it happened this week, when the World Health Organization announced that Indian generic drug maker Ranbaxy would be withdrawing all of its AIDS drugs from the group's prequalification list because of "doubts" about their effectiveness. The news came, we'll presume coincidentally, just after an election in which drug companies and prescription-drug pricing were hot targets for demagoguery by Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. The primary markets for Ranbaxy's products were the AIDS-ravaged countries of Africa, but the news should prompt a reconsideration of the discussion about domestic pharmaceuticals as well. Over the past year, Ranbaxy, along with Cipla and a few others, has been the darling of international health organizations trying to treat some of the AIDS epidemic wiping out whole generations in Africa. Because India does not recognize international patents, these corporations were able to churn out single-pill knockoffs of American- and European-made AIDS cocktails and distribute them at bargain-basement prices. (Even before the AIDS drugs became a hot ticket, Indian companies were merrily copying blockbusters like Viagra as fast as the market would absorb them.) Groups such as UNAIDS and Doctors Without Borders made headlines with the new AIDS pills selling at prices lower than those typically charged by the drug companies. (That is, when the drug companies aren't giving away the drugs for free in humanitarian efforts. But never mind.) The Bush administration's refusal to participate in distributing the pirated medications brought fury and an acrimonious divide between the AIDS groups and the country that often provides the bulk of their funding. President Bush made history with the size and scope of his commitment to AIDS in the developing world several years ago. But where many global AIDS activists are concerned, when it comes to the U.S., no good deed goes unpunished. The U.S.'s funding for HIV/AIDS this year will be $2.4 billion, and its overall contributions dwarf those of other contributor countries. But the administration has held to a position that African AIDS patients should receive the same anti-retroviral treatments we offer to patients here in the U.S. A principle no one would question for Western citizens — that no group of people should systematically be given an inferior and untested class of drugs simply because they are unable to pay — has become a source of fury against the United States' contributions to the global AIDS crisis. Much of that anger is based on the ideological argument against patent rights, of course. The rhetoric of that debate breaks down along the same philosophical party lines as the one here over drug prices — which is to say that, in some corners, it is all about sticking it to the drug companies at any cost. We should recognize the issues: In the past two years, there has been a stampede on the part of governors and Washington, D.C., policymakers to authorize the reimportation of drugs from Canada and other nations. All the problems of America's expensive medications could be solved, this contingent said, by performing a simple end-run around the greedy juggernaut of profit-seeking drug companies. In this, as in Africa, the Bush administration's insistence that it would not sanction the safety of drugs not vetted by the Food and Drug Administration has been met with sneers and accusations of callous disregard for human life. Certainly, this column has never believed that the imprimatur of the FDA is the end-all, be-all of drug access — life-saving medical innovations are sometimes needlessly delayed in the bureaucracy. In this sense, harping on drug "safety" issues too often serves as a fig-leaf for politicians who doubt Americans' ability to process the complex issues of patent rights and marginal costs. Canadian reimportation is an idiotic idea for reasons far more serious — and likely — than inferior drugs. But in the case of the three-drug combinations concocted by Indian generic manufacturers and promoted vociferously by international AIDS groups, the process bordered on recklessness. WHO prequalification is considered the gold standard for the AIDS drugs distributed by humanitarian groups, but it is far from rigorous — as the recent withdrawals show. The sheer numbers of victims of the African AIDS crisis and the lack of any infrastructure or treatment have understandably horrified the West. "The people you read about could stop dying if they... had access to the drugs," Time wrote in 2001, but "the people who make the drugs... have worked hard to keep prices up by limiting exports to the Third World and vigorously enforcing patent rights." But distributing drugs to 1,000 people means nothing if those drugs don't work. Wishing that drugs were safe and effective doesn't make them so, and African AIDS patients deserve better than to be caught in the middle of a Western spitball contest over drugs, pricing and intellectual property rights. Collin Levey writes Fridays for editorial pages of The Times. E-mail her at clevey@seattletimes.com

To: LindyBill who wrote (85733)	11/12/2004 3:55:21 PM
From: D. Long	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 793907

The author misses the point. The point isn't the obvious genetic humanity of a fetus. It is whether the fetus has the ethical status as a person that obligates us to protect it from being aborted. No ultrasound tells us that. This is just a species of the animal rights activists' argument - it's warm and fuzzy and cute and look it has feelings too. Cows are warm and fuzzy and taste good, and we don't accord it ethical status beyond deserving of not being cruelly treated before we cover it in A-1 and dig in. Derek