The Arbitrary ChuckJerry

According to a report from UNAIDS and the World Health Organization that was released earlier this week, the AIDS epidemic is simply spreading. More people today have HIV and AIDS than ever before and the AIDS rate increased in every part of the world except the Caribbean last year. Obviously there are lots of reasons for this and I'm not really going to discuss them. What interests me is that there's a huge argument here for some sort of decapitalization of the pharmaceutical industry.

The companies that make antiretroviral drugs, the main treatment for HIV patients, cannot make the drugs fast enough or cheaply enough for people all over the world to get them. Many people think the epidemic can be more effectively battled if the drugs were more readily available. The reason they are not is because only the companies that developed the drugs are making them. To date, they have not given permission to any other companies to produce the drugs and the other companies, including international ones, are not producing the drugs because they don't want to violate patents.

At some point the best interest of the dying people in the world should be taken into consideration, rather than just the profits and patent protection of the pharmaceutical companies. The issue is a lot more complex than I've represented it, or even than I understand it to be, most likely, but the bottom line is that drug companies across the globe could share the burden of producing these drugs and provide a service to the world at large. There are maybe about 50 different drugs that fall into the category of antiretroviral and they are presumably made by many different companies who all own patents on them. This is a sticky issue, but not without a feasible solution that would maybe curb the dramatic effects of HIV/AIDS.

For example, American drug companies produce antiretroviral drugs for $1500 per whatever unit they are measured in. They are also producing far less than is necessary because they are the only ones doing it. Chinese drug companies say they can produce the same amount of the same drug for 1/10th the price, $150, and can therefore contribute to providing more of the drugs at a lesser costs to governments interested in providing drugs to their citizens or other countries as aid.

Some sort of system where the drug companies can be paid for the rights and maybe given a tax cut or something should be worked out so that the people can have the medicine they need. Also people around the world should be more careful about getting AIDS, but that's an even bigger issue without one simple solution.