February 16, 2007

Globalization is a battering ram for Western corporations. And even when the consequences are literally life or death, companies are eager to utilize the World Trade Organization for their limitless hunger for profits.

Take a pending court case in India. It has the potential to adversely affect the health of not only the more than 1 billion Indian citizens but of patients throughout the developing world.

In 2005, India’s parliament amended its patent laws to comply with WTO rules, in spite of warnings by health experts that this would result in affordable medicines being no longer available in the country. “Amit Sen Gupta, head of the Delhi Science Forum, a scientists’ group, worries that product patents will turn the clock back to the 1960s, when Western drug companies dominated India, set high prices and conducted little research on tropical diseases that, like leprosy and malaria, do not affect Americans or Europeans,” the New York Times reported.

I was traveling by train in India a few months after the 2005 law was passed and entered into a conversation with a person who owned and operated a small pharmaceutical firm. When I asked him about the possible effects of the new patent law, he responded that it was too soon to assess the impact but that the long-term effects could be disastrous for Indian drug manufacturers.

Well, all these fears seem to be proving correct now. A significant court challenge has been launched in Indian courts by the Swiss pharmaceutical behemoth Novartis to stake its proprietary right over a leukemia drug.

And Novartis is far from the only Western pharmaceutical firm to have sought to assert a patent claim in India. In fact, the BBC reports that 9,000 pending patent applications are waiting to be reviewed in India under the new law! In another significant court case, the U.S.-based Gilead Sciences has attempted to press its claim for a patent for its antiretroviral drug Viread in India, a move that would make cheaper Indian versions unavailable in a host of nations.

“These generic drugs are not only consumed in India,” Leena Menghaney of the Nobel-winning Doctors Without Borders told The New York Times. “People in Africa and the Caribbean are relying on India to produce these drugs. . . . The quality matches that of U.S.- manufactured drugs, but the prices are affordable.”

To give an example of the burden that will be imposed on poor patients in the developing world if the strategy of Western pharmaceutical firms succeeds, Gilead’s Viread costs nearly $6,000 per patient per year in the West. A generic version of the drug made by an Indian pharmaceutical, Cipla, costs $700, with the chair of the company, Yusuf Hamied, promising that it would be made available in Africa for half that cost. But all this could be imperiled if companies like Gilead have their way in Indian courts. Realizing the potentially life-threatening consequences of this issue, AIDS activists in India are waging a number of campaigns involving such drugs, including against Gilead and the British giant GlaxoSmithKline.

A bit of background: In 1970, India under the Indira Gandhi government amended its patent law to have patents awarded only for processes to make medicines, not for the final products. This enabled Indian pharmaceutical firms to alter the processes slightly and make cheaper versions of essentially the same products sold by Western firms in India for astronomical prices. The result?

“India became the ‘pharmacy of the world's poor’ in 1970 when it stopped issuing patents for medicines,” the BBC states. “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.”

The changed law also dramatically improved lives in India. “At the time, India's drug prices were among the highest in the world,” wrote The New York Times a few years ago. “Now they are among the lowest. Access to drugs is one reason that average life expectancy has risen to 64 today.”

Now all of this is being jeopardized, with grave health consequences. The BBC quotes Doctors Without Borders as saying that a number of Indian firms have already stopped producing some generic AIDS drugs because of the possible legal ramifications.

Greed knows no limit for some corporations. Even when it involves the lives of millions.