Mosquito nets needed before gene cures

Friday, March 23rd 2001

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Lyons - Last year was a stunner for medicine: 21 new drugs - an unparalleled number - were marketed by United States pharmaceutical companies.

The treatments for heart disease, multiple sclerosis, hepatitis, Alzheimer's, epilepsy and cancers - poured out of America's biotechnology giants.

There has never been a better time to be ill - if you are American. For the worlds's riches people, things can only get better.

But for the rest of the planet, fears are growing that others may have to pay the price for this meteoric rise medical knowledge.

The concerns of the US biotechnology industry are sweeping aside everything in their path. The point was starkly underlined at the BioVision 2001 life science forum in Lyons this week.

International health officials, drug company chiefs and doctors all expressed alarm that the US genetics juggernaut has become so powerful that it threatens to force its products on the world, whether it likes it or not.

At best, the consequences will be wasteful. At worst, they will be dangerous to health.

In most African countries, new heart drugs are useless in towns and villages where most people die before middle age. As Dr Tikki Pang, of the World Health Organisation, put it, "There is a simple question to consider. Will current advances in genomics help the developing world? And the answer is that they will not." Dr Pang said the world needed mosquito nets, cheap rehydrating drugs and condoms to combat its three main killers - malaria, diarrhoeal illnesses and Aids - not high-tech drugs to ease the symptoms of old age.

The health of Africans and Asians could worsen because of the rise of the US genetics industry, he said. Malaria, which killed more than a million people a year most of them children, illustrated what could happen.

"It is attractive to think that sequencing its genes will lead to new drugs and insecticides," said Dr Pang. "It is more likely, however, that any such discoveries will be patented and only developed at prices unaffordable to those who need them most."

Other controversial biotechnology forays include Syngenta's "golden rice," normal rice that has been genetically engineered to make Vitamin A. This, it is claimed, could save thousands of Third World lives.

Some scientist even claim that a month's delay in marketing golden rice could cause more than 50,000 children to go blind through Vitamin A deficiency. But Greenpeace research suggests a person would have to eat 10kg of rice a day receive a sight-saving dose of the vitamin.

Source New Zealand Herald February 17 2001

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