I'm currently reading the book, "The Shackled Continent," by Robert Guest. This passage, I thought, went well with what I had written last week about malaria:
"One problem that Africans are almost powerless to solve, at least in the short term, is that most medical research is done in rich countries for the benefit of rich people. The fattest profits are to be made tackling chronic conditions that affect lots of Wsesterners, such as heart disease and cancer. The ills of the poor are neglected: of the 1,223 drugs introduced between 1975 and 1996, only thirteen were aimed at tropical diseases. In 1998, the world spent $70 billion on health research, but only $300 million of this was directed at developing an AIDS vaccine, and a mere $100 million was devoted to fighting malaria." (pg. 202)
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