Nielson: firms’ demand for profit hits access to life-saving vaccine

Date: 16/07/01

By David Cronin

The drug industry is refusing to distribute vaccines for a deadly tropical disease affecting 20 million people, even though it has benefited from almost €10 million in EU research grants, development chief Poul Nielson has acknowledged.

The Union funds have been used to develop medicines for the parasitic disease bilharzia in recent years. But the extensive trials on the drugs needed to assess their effectiveness are "hampered by the profitability requirements of private industry to undertake such large-scale investments," said Nielson, responding to a query from Dutch left-wing MEP Erik Meijer.

Despite this reply, Nielson's spokesman Michael Curtis said that the Commission is sponsoring an "ongoing project" aimed at combating the disease. A Belgian biotechnology company, Hainault-Gentech, has been among the main beneficiaries of research funding, while tests of the products developed have been conducted in Senegal and Niger. An estimated 200,000 die from bilharzia each year, mostly in Africa.

It is caused by the schistosoma flatworm, normally found in snails; when it lays eggs in human blood vessels, a painful deterioration of the bladder, intestines and liver can occur. If untreated, the disease often leads to death within a decade of infection. A Swedish television documentary screened in February reported that a drug called RSM-14, regarded by many scientists as an effective vaccine for bilharzia, was devised in 1991. Subsequent research, including that supported by the EU, has advanced the quest for a cure, while Westerners who have caught bilharzia while in Africa have been given a pill called praziquantel upon returning home. David Earnshaw, a campaigner with anti-poverty group Oxfam, accused the pharmaceutical industry of immoral behaviour by "trying to enforce the same kind of pricing regimes in the Southern Hemisphere as they do in richer, industrialised countries".

He welcomed efforts by EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy to reform TRIPS, the international patents system, so that drugs firms cannot use intellectual property restrictions to deny access to potentially life-saving products. Lamy's efforts have, however, met with stiff resistance from Washington during discussions at the World Trade Organisation headquarters in Geneva over the past few weeks.

The drug industry is refusing to distribute vaccines for a deadly tropical disease affecting 20 million people, even though it has benefited from almost €10 million in EU research grants, development chief Poul Nielson has acknowledged.