The true story of how multinational drug companies took liberties with Afr

[lovuian]

http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/redir.php?jid=6a4c42f5ea90a729&cat=c08dd24cec417021

The true story of how multinational drug companies took liberties with African lives
The pharmaceutical industry is bracing itself for criticism when the film 'The Constant Gardener' opens next month. But Jeremy Laurance reports that away from the Hollywood script is a true story of how multinational drug companies took liberties with African lives with devastating consequences
Published: 26 September 2005
In a dusty schoolyard in Kano, northern Nigeria, a group of children are kicking a football. One of them, a solemn-faced boy called Anas, sits watching quietly. He cannot play because he has pains in his knees that prevent him from running.

Nobody knows what caused Anas' pain but suspicion has fallen on Big Pharma. Six years earlier, Anas was a patient in a trial of a new drug run by one of the world's biggest companies. A known side effect of the drug, called Trovan, was joint pain. The issues raised by Anas' story have become the subject of a major British film.

The multinational pharmaceutical industry is bracing itself for an uncomfortable autumn. Next month, The Constant Gardener, the film based on the novel of the same name by John Le Carré, opens in London.

Directed by Fernando Meirelles, of City of God fame, it is a thriller, a love story and a blistering attack on the drugs industry and the way it carelessly expends the lives of innocent citizens in the Third World in the quest for billion-dollar medicines to sell to the first world.


Wow I want to see that movie!!!

[Divernan]

1. Excellent film, but I felt like my heart was breaking by the end of it.

It is based on a book by John LeCarre. While LeCarre states that the big 3 Pharmas( a character in the film refers to them as the axis of evil) are fictional, he says he has seen worse actions by the drug companies in the reality of Africa. In the film, in order to receive drugs for AIDS, the illiterate Africans are forced/bribed by cheap gifts (like beads to the Native Americans) to sign releases and take a second drug which is being "tested". Side effects, sometimes lethal, are hidden so the drug can be quickly approved and millions in profits quickly realized.

The film was shot in London, Germany, Canada, but mainly in Africa - showing the huge settlements of impoverished refugees.Those tens of thousands of people were not extras, but Africans in their real and desperate living conditions. The film forces the realization of the vast human suffering - the plight of the children was what I found most heart breaking. When I thought of the BILLIONS of our tax dollars spreading death and destruction in Iraq, and in god knows how many covert actions in the third world, and then thought of all the GOOD we could be doing for our own citizens and those in desperate straits in other countries, I was deeply depressed and saddened.
It's a powerful, engrossing film - please see it.

[girl gone mad]

2. It isn't just Africa...

they do it in orphanages right here in America, too.

http://nypress.com/18/30/news&columns/liamscheff.cfm