While pharmaceutical companies have no doubt created life-saving drugs that have saved millions of lives, they have also participated in practices around the world that have come under a growing amount of criticism.
NGOs allege that the pharmaceutical corporations:
· sell products in developing countries that are withdrawn in the West;
· cause the poor to divert money away from essential items, such as foodstuffs, to paying for expensive, patented medicines, thereby adding to problems of malnutrition;
· promote antibiotics for relatively trivial illnesses;
· resist measures that would help governments of developing countries to promote generic drugs at low cost;
· use their home government to support their operation with threats if necessary, such as withdrawing aid, if a host government does anything to threaten their interests.
— John Madeley, Big Business Poor Peoples; The Impact of Transnational Corporations on the World’s Poor
[Excerts of research compilation by Anup Shah]
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