beyondkaoru - Slashdot User

Submission + - Gates foundation deathly side-effects (latimes.com) 3

Submitted by HuguesT on Tuesday December 18, 2007 @06:45AM

HuguesT writes: An long and detailed article from the L.A. Times points out severe, unintended side effects of the health policies of the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation. This foundation has given away almost 2 billions US$ to the fight against AIDS, TB and Malaria worldwide. Thanks in no small measure to this effort, the death toll from AIDS in most of Africa are finally levelling off. However, the money from the foundation is earmarked to the fight against these three diseases, to the detriment of global health. Sick people can also be hungry and not able to ingest healing drugs. Doctors in these countries prefer to be well paid working against AIDS than poorly working against all the other health problems, which creates a brain drain. Numerous children also suffer from diarrhea or asphyxia due to lack of basic care. The paradox is that countries where the foundation has invested most have seen their mortality rate increase, whereas it has improved in countries where the foundation was least involved.

Comment Re:drug patents don't work out economically (Score 2, Insightful) 213

by damneinstien on Thursday November 08, 2007 @04:53AM (#21278905) Attached to: Bill to Require Open Access to Scientific Papers

If you do the math, it would be cheaper for the government (i.e., cost less in your and my tax dollars) to do away with drug patents altogether and pay for the full development cost of each drug.

Not that I support big drug companies or anything, but how are you coming up with that? Logic dictates that governments would be less efficient in producing drugs (like they seem to be with everything else). Further, you are then forced to rely on the current government in power to decide on what avenues (drug development wise) to pursue. If that was the case, you would never get things like the "morning after pill" or anything else that has any controversy behind it.

In fact, market forces cause companies to develop the most profitable drugs, but those are not the drugs we actually need.

Really? Well, the market seems to think that we need these drugs, doesn't it?

Drugs that actually cure, that are based on public domain substances ...

Huh? What are you suggesting? That pharmaceutical companies provide no drugs of non-trivial value to society? Interesting. What about the HIV cocktails like Isentress , Zidovudine ? I could go on and list a 100 more, but I think I have shown my point.

Star Wreck Creators Announce Iron Sky 98

Posted by Zonk on Saturday May 13, 2006 @06:32PM from the more-from-those-guys dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The makers of the Star Trek and Babylon 5 cross-over spoof Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning have announced their upcoming movie Iron Sky. It's apparently another sci-fi comedy with its own universe. Says Director Timo Vuorensola: 'It is still an open question whether it will be distributed also for free. We would very much like it, but it will depend a lot on the financiers.'"

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