DIARY: Ruminations, Occasional thoughts & happenings - as they arise
Singing
Horses
Wed 21st May 2003
I like this! Click on 'Singing Horses' - above - and when they come up click on
each till you have 4-horse quartet going. You can click on each horse to
make it into a trio or duet or whatever. Funny, grand little programme whoever
designed it!
Dying For Drugs 28 April 2003
Last night, with
increasing horror and anger I watched a Channel4 programme entitled Dying For
Drugs, revealing how pharmaceutical manufacturing companies in America, Canada
and Britain, making billons of dollars in profit, insisted upon charging as much
as $27 per tablet to people in poorer countries (some without any income, some
with a weekly income of around $55) for drugs that are the only possible way of
preventing death from leukemia for thousands upon thousands of people - tablets
that cost less than 50 cents to produce!
Shame upon shame upon such companies - household names such
as Pfizer - and the people who run them!
At the sight of a young lad, dying at the age of 12, I found
myself weeping - for the very first time in my life during a factual TV
documentary. Shortly after a solemn blessing by a priest, invoking the
power and love of the Holy Spirit over the frail body of this boy, the young lad
died in a car, on his way to hospital.
This is a photograph of him, reduced from a smiling, beautiful young lad to a
wasted, sick skeleton because pharmaceutical companies - already making billions
in the West - will not reduce prices in developing countries. Shame upon
them! At the day of reckoning the Directors of such Companies will have much to
answer for.
This is the lad:
May God have mercy upon the Directors of the pharmaceutical companies who
caused his death by refusing to reduce the prices of life-saving drugs.
Yuck!
May God also help his grief stricken family.
Watching his death was like watching the death of one of my own.
This wasChannel4's write-up about the programme:
DYING FOR DRUGS Sunday, 27 April, 8.30pm
A hard-hitting investigation into the global power of the world's most
profitable business - the pharmaceutical industry. The programme reveals just
how far drug companies are prepared to go to get their drugs approved and what
they will do to make sure they get the prices they want. In Africa the team sees
how one of the world's biggest drug companies experimented on children without
their parents' knowledge or consent. In Canada they reveal how a drug company
attempted to silence a leading academic who had doubts about their drug. In
South Korea cameras follow the attempts of desperately ill patients to make a
leading drug company sell them the drugs they need to save their lives at an
affordable price. And in Honduras the team uncovers the brutal consequences of
drug companies' pricing policies. This is a powerful film with alarming
implications for everyone whose health depends on prescription medicines. If the
power of these multi-nationals remains unchecked, many more people will soon be
dying for drugs.
Channel4 says: For
more information about the issues raised in the programme check out the links
below:
(Some may go out of date as time passes.)
Campaigning
groups
Information
on the drugs and drugs trials
Disease
information and charities
Ethical
regulation on drug testing
International
bodies
Relevant
news stories
Story
specific groups
Pharmaceutical
companies
Other
international health aid agencies