Materia Medica Malaysiana

Little Research On Cures For Diseases

IPOH, March 18 (Bernama) -- It is unacceptable that so litte research has been devoted to vaccines or cures for diseases that kill millions each year in poor countries while vast sums are spent on producing drugs to fight baldness and erectile dysfunction, Raja Nazrin Shah said Friday.
The Raja Muda of Perak said it was common these days to speak of medicine as a business and the pharmaceutical industry was one area where commercial considerations often came into conflict with humanitarian concerns.
"Today, only 10 per cent of health research is devoted to diseases that occur for 90 per cent of the global disease burden. These are diseases that occur primarily in the more underdeveloped parts of the world," he said in the "Sultan Azlan Shah Oration" at the opening of the 4th Asean Conference in Primary Health Care, here.
Perak's Sultan Azlan Shah opened the four-day conference which started yesterday. Among those present were Menteri Besar Datuk Seri Tajol Rosli Ghazali and more than 352 delegates from Malaysia, Singapore, India and Brunei.
Raja Nazrin said that developing treatment for diseases like malaria, sleeping sickness and tuberculosis was an unprofitable venture for multinational companies.
"Even when cures are available, high prices put these drugs beyond the reach of the majority of the disease's victims worldwide. In focusing on research at the top end of the market, pharmaceutical companies are merely responding to the incentives of the market place," he said.
He was therefore happy to note that a new initiative known as "Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiatives" had been formed to undertake drug development for neglected diseases such as malaria.
He also said that the art of listening to the patient was sadly curtailed, which leads to a concentration on the physical symptoms and prompt, standardised diagnoses.
"Doctors and nurses may be restricted not only in the units of time afforded per patient but in a more restricted range of treatments readily and conveniently available. However unfairly or indiscriminately, doctors are oftentimes accused of treating diseases or "cases" instead of treating people," he said.
He said clinical practice should always operate within ethics as science alone was not equipped to resolve these difficult moral questions and "we need the humanities to guide us towards a solution".
"I do not believe that compassion need to be constrained by time. It need not be sacrificed because the physician has only five minutes with a patient. Our compassion allows us to share the human experience," he said.