[wordup] bits from may/june adbusters.

[Adam Shand]

for those of you that don't know about adbusters you should check it out.
while it's not the end all, be all, that some would like it to be it has a
lot of interesting information and is a fairly reliable source of
information.

and a side note i thought was interesting, unfortunately no sources are
cited but i was just speculating to teresa about this a couple days ago.

"He who dies with most toys wines," was the rallying cry of the 1980's "me
generation."  Now studies by childhood researchers in the US and Britian
have updated the slogan: "He who's born with the most toys loses."  The
research shows that children who are given a lot of toys get "overwhelmed"
and often play less, learn less and develop more slowly.  The "distraction
element" affects even those kids with access to such educational
"advantages" as computers.  -JM

URL: http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/35/pharm.html

Profits protected at the expense of millions of lives

The provision of AIDS drugs to the developing world is becoming more than
just the biggest corporate PR headache faced by multinational corporations
in recent memory. It may just be the issue that exposes the Achilles heel
of the WTO.

The competing interests are clear. On one side stand 95 percent of the
world's 36 million sufferers of AIDS concentrated in the poorest countries
in the world. On the other, multinational drug makers ring up double-digit
profits while hiding behind puncture-proof patent protection on drugs that
are far too expensive for citizens of developing countries to afford. Any
country that tries to get around patent-protection rules, because its
people are dying, has to get past the WTO first.

That hasn't stopped some countries from trying. Brazil has been making its
own knock-off versions of triple therapy - the mainstay AIDS treatment -
and providing them free to the 90,000 of its citizens who are
HIV-positive. In India, the generic drug manufacturer Cipla has said it
will sell its triple-combination AIDS therapy to the humanitarian group
MSF for $350 per year per patient (the same drug combination in the US
would cost about $10,400). In South Africa, the government is importing
patented AIDS medicine from wherever it's most cheaply available.

In theory, the WTO relaxes trade laws in cases of a "national emergency."
But in fact such public health safeguards are steadily being eroded
through the combined efforts of Washington and the pharmaceutical
industry. The US has threatened to take Brazil to court - national
emergency or no national emergency - for violating intellectual property
rights. And in South African courts, 39 major drug companies are currently
contesting Nelson Mandela's initiative to seek the least expensive
medicine for his country's four million AIDS sufferers.

The whole drama has what an Eli Lilly flack might call "very bad optics."
When 11 million people in developing countries are dying each year from
preventable infectious diseases for the lack of basic medicines, and yet
the US Trade Representative's office has essentially told 16 developing
countries - including India, Egypt, the Dominican Republic and Thailand -
to strengthen patent protection or get clubbed with trade sanctions, it's
no wonder the US and the WTO are fast losing face. A few more issues like
this one, which generate overwhelming public sympathy against it, might
force permanent changes to the WTO.

- Basil Smallwood