Drug Prices

A drug called eflornithine was developed in the 1970’s to treat cancer. It didn’t suppress cancer very well—but it did, unexpectedly, cure something else: sleeping sickness. Endemic in many parts of Africa, sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis) is the second most deadly parasitic disease on the planet. (Malaria is first.) Treated with eflornithine, the near-dead sleepers arise, take up their pallets, and walk.

But they are too poor to pay on the way out. In 1999, the manufacturer stopped producing the drug. It licensed the formula to the World Health Organization (WHO), but no other company was willing to make it. The reason was obvious: sub-Saharan Africa cannot cover even the second-pill cost of manufacturing Western drugs to Western standards. And the really poor, or those that assist them, can barely afford the last-pill cost.

Then Bristol-Myers-Squibb discovered that eflornithine impedes the growth of women’s facial hair, and began marketing it in a beauty cream called Vaniqa. The company that still controlled the rights gave the WHO $25 million—enough for a five-year supply, at last-pill prices, plus research, surveillance, and training of health-care workers. Yes, the rich get Viagra, and Vaniqa too. The poor still get malaria, but they can now beat trypanosomiasis.

Peter W. Huber writes in Commentary on why big drug companies have a defense.

[HT: Manhattan Institute ]