Joep M A Lange expresses his frustration about protesters 'derailing' trials of PrEP a few years ago, referring to the halting of the trials in Cambodia, Cameroon and Nigeria. He wishes that protesters would all operate under some kind of umbrella, presumably so they can all be bought off all at once, like himself. But there is a good reason why protesters do not operate under an umbrella organization: they often have very different agenda.
And there are many reasons for questioning the use of PrEP as an ostensible means of reducing HIV transmission in developing countries. Some would argue that health is not purely a matter of disease eradication and they object to the medicalization of health, where people dying of water borne diseases are given drugs which they swallow using contaminated water.
Others might worry about the side effects of taking drugs, especially for healthy people. Then there's resistance, where people taking PrEP might be or become infected with HIV and resistance would develop. They would have a difficult and expensive to treat strain of HIV, which they could easily transmit to others. The 'cure' would have made things a lot worse.
These are all legitimate worries and they all need to be on the drug companies' agenda, whether they like it or not. They can't be relegated to any other business, crowded under an 'umbrella', to be treated with the same contempt that the pharmaceutical industry treats people in high HIV prevalence countries, HIV positive and HIV negative alike.
But there are two other worries I'd like to highlight here: firstly, Joep raises the issue of 'female-controlled' prevention techniques (though he says technologies because it musth be high tech, right?). The drug industry likes to point out how terrible the plight of women and children is and how men are so unreliable and badly behaved and that they are making PrEP available to help the most vulnerable people in high HIV prevalence countries.
But this is an argument for researching the issue of disempowerment and ways of alleviating it. Of course, drug companies may not have a big part to play, you certainly can't cure those problems with a drug. But I suspect that's how they want to push their products. They should consider how decades of availability of contraceptive drugs haven't done anything for the disempowered, nor much for fertility, either.
A second important issue around PrEP is that the HIV industry as a whole, that vast 'umbrella' of people and institutions who are doing very well out of the HIV pandemic and want to do a whole lot better, doesn't know a great deal about how HIV is transmitted. Or rather, much of their 'technology' is aimed at sexual transmission of HIV when non-sexual transmission of HIV is not talked about.
Joep and the string of competing interests he lists in his article have been trying to set the agenda for years, they are still trying. Opposition should come from anywhere there is a legitimate worry about the agenda for every international HIV/Aids conference, because the worries are many. Whereas the agenda of Big Pharma is always the same: how to get bigger.
Healthy people don't need medicine and sick people don't need useless, potentially harmful medicine. As long as there is Big Pharma, stupid ideas like PrEP and hyenas like Joep, I hope there will also be protests and protesters, shouting all the louder because they don't have access to the high platforms and the influential ears enjoyed by the HIV industry.
No comments:
Post a Comment