Alphabet soup won't cure this ailment

JWR ^ | 2-25-05 | James P. Pinkerton

[FlyLow]

There's a cloud on the health horizon no bigger than a fist. Right now, that cloud is just a jumble of acronyms. But soon, those acronyms could darken the human future, as fewer life-saving drugs are created — and at a higher cost.

Americans aren't always interested in foreign news, but we have learned that international organizations — summed up in acronyms such as "UN," and "NATO," and "OPEC" — can have great impact on our lives. And newer entities, such as the European Union, the World Trade Organization and the International Criminal Court, are becoming known by their initials. So maybe, too, with "CBD" and "LMMC."

A little background: last week in Bangkok, Thailand, a group with a comically bureaucratic name met for a purpose that's no laughing matter. The Third Meeting of the Ad Hoc Open- Ended Working Group on Asset and Benefit Sharing of the Convention on Biodiversity wrangled over the fate of the world's collective medicine chest.

Attending that meeting was a 17-nation acronym armada, the Like-Minded Group of Mega-Diverse Countries (LMMC), including Brazil and India, who encompass two-thirds of the world's species of flora and fauna. This group pushed for a radical change in the way medicines are developed.

These LMMC countries, spearheaded by international Green outfits with a distinctly anti-corporate bias, wish to rewrite the terms under which pharmaceutical companies "bioprospect" around the world. Bioprospecting is what it sounds like: Scientists go exploring, taking samples, hoping to find the next Taxol. Taxol, the anti-breast cancer drug, had its origins in the Pacific yew tree, although it took Bristol-Myers two decades, and hundreds of millions of dollars, to turn mere bark into a proven life-saver.

[Lancey Howard]

Great post.
BUMP!!!