Newsday - February 23, 2000
Laurie Garrett, Staff Writer

Former World Bank economist Richard Feachem, now head of the Institute for Global Health at the University of California in San Francisco, said that "the urgency is extreme and we need solutions tomorrow. Today, even. There is a strong sense of the clock ticking." He spoke at a news conference ending a meeting of experts from the World Health Organization and other agencies.

Highly drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis have recently surfaced in 120 nations-up from fewer than five countries a decade ago. And all over the world malaria parasites are growing increasingly resistant to humanity's small drug arsenal. Five million people were killed last year by HIV, TB and malaria, Feachem said, and all three pandemics are on the rise, promising to claim twice as many lives within the next five years.

Dean Jamison, chief economist for WHO, applauded President Bill Clinton's call for a $1-billion tax exemption for pharmaceutical companies that spend money on the research and development of new vaccines. Clinton issued that call in his State of the Union address last month. The San Francisco meeting also endorsed similar plans within the British government of Tony Blair and the European Community.

"From an industry standpoint-from major pharmaceutical companies' perspective-the incentives are the most important," Hannah Kettler of the London-based, industry-funded Office of Health Economics said.

The problem is simple: Pharmaceutical companies need to earn large profits in order to satisfy their stock investors. That means, Feachem said, that the drug companies do not want to get involved in scientific research and drug development of any medicine that cannot earn around $300 million in annual sales. But the gravest needs are in countries where the pharmaceutical market is very small, people are quite poor, and such astronomical sales targets will likely remain unrealistic well into this century. Some American and European scientists are hard at work in their National Institutes of Health and university laboratories trying to find ways to cure such diseases. But drug companies see no financial incentive for taking such innovations beyond the lab bench into manufacture and global distribution.

Clinton's tax incentive plan is a beginning, the group concluded. But within most of the world's governments, Jamison insisted, "we fail to see much of a sense of urgency. And that lack of urgency is part of what contributes to the rapid growth of these diseases."

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