The Real Constant Gardener

The Real Constant Gardener
The Constant Gardener opens this week-end in Austria. It's a film about a conspiracy involving pharmaceutical companies using HIV-positive Africans as guinea pigs for experimental treatments. The movie is a chilling piece of fiction, but it raises some important questions about the way drug companies operate in the real world.

A good place to start raising these questions is India, where the drug research boom has been described as a modern day gold rush. It is certainly as lucrative but critics fear it could be just as ruthless.

Research experts and human rights activists are concerned that profit and progress are being put ahead of vital ethical questions in India. They criticise both local Indian companies and the multinationals. As Stefan Ecks of Edinburgh University puts it: "There is a bit of a feeling that you should grasp all the opportunities you can at the moment and only look into the ethical questions later"






The New Gold Rush
Last year the World Trade Organisation persuaded Indian companies to stop producing cheap generic copies of patent drugs. They were left with the choice between paying up for the patent or investing in their own research. Most chose the latter and so a new lucrative centre for drug research was born.

In many ways India is the perfect base to carry out clinical trials for new drugs. The huge country offers both plentiful medical expertise and a large testing ground. Each year the country's medical schools churn out 17,000 new doctors and they work for a fraction of Western salaries. At the disposal of this educated elite are the uneducated and poor masses in the countryside, who can be persuaded into 'volunteering' for studies for as little as $50-100.

And it's not just the low costs which make the sub-continent a particularly attractive base for pharmaceutical companies. Whilst here in Europe we pop pills regularly from the cradle onwards, many Indians are what the industry calls "treatment naïve". This means that their systems aren't tainted by other biometric drugs. They provide, therefore, a sort of blank canvas for medical researchers to paint on and the effects of a new drug will be seen more clearly.

click title to read on

posted by Robert Heard at 8:58 AM