Quote:
Originally posted by HOZ@Sep 17 2004, 12:39 AM
10's of thousands lost because he saw a way to profiteer off of medicines supposedly to go to the needy.
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Whoa, you want to talk about profiteering off of medicine for the needy? Nobody in the world is worse for this than the US drug companies and government.
The US spent 2.4 billion on AIDS relief for Africa. Good for them. Except that the administration had a catch. The only thing that the relief agencies could buy with this money was brand-name prescription American drugs. Now, to treat a single victim for a single year costs $700. So under the US plan, roughly 3.5 million people received treatment. However, there are cheap drugs produced in countries such as Thailand that have been proved to be just as effective, and generally cost around $150 per victim per year. If the US had allowed money to be spent on generic drugs, treatment could have been provided to something like 16 million people. That's a difference of around 12.5 million sufferers. Now, not all of those are going to result in lives saved. But the US basically sacrificed the lives of millions (just in this last year) of Africans so that 1.9 billion or so of funding could go directly to American drug companies. America could easily spend half the money, and provide treatment to twice the number of people, just by allowing the money to be spent on generic drugs.
I'm not trying to draw any similarities here between Bush and Hussein with this, far from it. The AIDS profiteering is the result of simple greed and ignorance, while Hussein's were probably largely motivated by malice. Did Bush even have a role in this? Well, it was implemented by his administration, but it's hard to say whether he's even aware of this. But if this isn't one of the worst example of profiteering off of medicine ever, I don't know what is. Anyway, I realize this is way off topic, but I couldn't let it pass.