Alarmists aim for pharmaceutical profits

An investment manager covered in England's Financial Times is 
intentionally scaring the public about the scale of infectious disease in the 
world, in the hopes of supporting pharmaceutical company stock prices. 
Paul Dietrich says, "'There's a good chance that the waiter at just about 
any restaurant has tuberculosis.'"(1)

Dietrich's company invests $500 million on behalf of investors, but 
Dietrich is also the head of the Institute for International Health and 
Development. He says 1.8 billion people will receive a serious infection 
this year, with China already having half its population with TB 
(tuberculosis) and the United $tates having had 15 million new infections in 
recent years. "'If you have a cold and then board an airplane or go to 
a restaurant. . . well, that is how it happens,'" says Dietrich.
By contrast, the World Health Organization estimates that "nearly one 
billion people" will be infected with TB bacilli in the next ITAL 20 
years END -- that's 1/40th Dietrich's rate!(2) Also, about 90% of people 
who are infected with TB bacilli do not develop TB disease.

Certainly TB is a serious public health problem,(3) but Dietrich wildly 
overestimates its severity to boost investment in his company and drive 
people to buy products they may not need. This is similar to 
hard-pressure tactics used by home "water purification" systems. They talk about 
the kinds of diseases that can be transmitted via drinking water, maybe 
mouth some platitudes about the destruction of the environment -- but 
they never present hard data on what the absolute risk of contracting 
disease from drinking water, or if their filter is actually effective at 
fighting the diseases they cited, or it perhaps it doesn't make more 
sense to invest in one better purification plant for the whole area 
rather than hundreds of thousands of expensive persynal systems.

In the People's Republic of China under Mao in the Cultural Revolution 
and also under Stalin in the Soviet Union, scientists had to be follow 
a proletarian agenda, or least not harm that agenda. Our critics say we 
foolishly substitute politics for science, but in fact, in all 
countries, science production and promotion is political. It is only the naive 
and apolitical who do not realize that the choice is between people 
like Dietrich profiting from science or proletarians living better lives 
because science takes up the public interest. There is no politically 
neutral ground in deciding what scientific problems to solve and how to 
promote scientific knowledge. The reason is that both require resources 
and both provide opportunity for profit-making.

The public has a right to science production free of private interests. 
The public should not have to worry about who is paying off whom to say 
what. Moreover, the desperate tactics of naive do-gooders who 
understandably cannot figure out a road forward under capitalism can also divert 
necessary resources from more urgent struggles.

MIM would add that under capitalism, the health-related corporations 
have no interest in permanently solving health problems, because if they 
did, they would lose business. It is much more profitable to sell a 
palliative for a disease than to prevent or absolutely cure and terminate 
a disease, because of how patents and other "intellectual property" 
work in imperialist countries. If all diseases were gone, the owners of 
patents and factories in drug production would not earn money. That is 
why there are so many mediocre drugs approved by the imperialist 
governments each year and so few great inventions like penicillin. This is 
reason enough to oppose capitalism.

Notes: 
1. Financial Times 7June2001, p. 26.
2. WHO, TB Fact Sheet, Apr 2000, www.who.int/gtb.
3. In the united $tates last year, just under 17,000 people contracted 
TB disease. Worldwide, TB disease affects 8 million new people and 
kills 2 million every year (CDC, "U.S. TB cases decline 7 percent in 2000, 
reaching all-time low," 12 June 2001). In the late 19th and early 20th 
centuries, TB was one of the leading causes of death in the 
industrialized countries. It declined there thanks to drugs like penicillin and 
public health measures, such as cleaner, less crowded living conditions, 
better ventilation, and aggressive surveillance and treatment.
TB rates began to rise again in the united $tates in the late 80s and 
90s, partly because people with HIV/AIDS are at increased risk of TB 
infection, partly because of the increase in the u.$. prison population 
(MIM NOTES), and partly because some of the earlier prevention efforts 
eroded. For example, the New York department of health only had NNN 
people on staff to chart a TB outbreak in NNN, thanks to budget cuts.
The persistence of TB in oppressed countries and its resurgence in 
imperialist countries is an indication of the failure of capitalist health 
care. Quacks like Dietrich try to drum up business for their snake oil, 
but the truth is that often the best strategies for disease control -- 
such as prevention or vaccination -- are unprofitable.