Subscribe to RSS feedBill Gates on pharma’s priorities: “Baldness hasn’t killed anyone yet.”
Bill Gates, the cofounder and chairman of the Microsoft, and cofounder and cochair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, recently spoke at the University of Chicago. A major focus of the Foundation, which is one of the largest in the world, is on international health and in particular on diseases striking people in the Third World that get scant attention from pharmaceutical companies.
He offered this insight into the skewed priorities of the pharmaceutical industry:
“Malaria kills 1 million people a year; baldness hasn’t killed anyone yet. Less than 10 percent of the money spent on curing baldness is spent on fighting malaria.”
(from Chicago Tribune, Microsoft’s Gates says computers not cure-all, February 25, 2008)
‘Nuff said.
Although, it’s worth noting that the Institute for One World Health, a nonprofit pharmaceutical company , just announced a partnership with Amyris Biotechnologies and sanofi aventis for the development of semisynthetic artemisinin, a key ingredient in first-line malaria treatments. The project has been ongoing since 2004, and was funded with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Hat Tip: Julie’s Health Club
March 8th, 2008 at 2:34 PM
Regarding your Bill gates point, I happen to concur with its contents. Lifestyle drugs I correlate with disease creation, which both are due to some in the pharma industry. They, I believe, are quite capable of producing products that actually benefit patients, as they have historically done with great succeiss at times. One can only speculate, or preume, why this is not nearly as frequent as it should be, with the resouces available to this industry in particular.
I’m not a doctor, nor am I a bitter or angry opponent to the pharma industry. I ask that priorities change creatly with this industry for the greater benefit of public health. It’s that simple. And my views are based on educating myself greatly on what is possible, instead of what I wish, so I can assure myself, and perhaps others, of the changes that are realistically possible for improvements in our health care system, instead of annotating baseless comments to fuel hatred for those who some may consider enemies of this system.