Fire in the Blood

It's hard to believe that medicine is available to alleviate the suffering of millions of impoverished global citizens, and, that due to associated 'prohibitive' costs, they're left to die because they can't afford treatment.

According to Dylan Mohan Gray's Fire in the Blood, pharmaceutical companies are the most profitable in the world, but their obsession with increasing their profits primarily and treating the sick as an afterthought is disturbing; always thought curing illness was the primary function of discovering cures for illness, mistaken was I, holding on to a drug's patent so that you can monopolize its sale to people who have no alternative and then jack-up the price is the primary function, recently formalized by the WTO's adoption of TRIPS.

It's revolting.

The film is about the struggle of many African countries to receive access to antivirals which combat but don't cure AIDS, allowing people who contracted it to live a relatively normal life.

A brilliant doctor from India,Yusuf Hamied, created a generic alternative, produced and sold it for a fraction of his American competitor's price, but the sale of his drug was initially not permitted in many countries due to their governments acquiescence to the demands of patent holding pharmaceutical giants, whose stranglehold on the free market was more voraciously tightened by TRIPS.

Apparently these companies don't even spend much on research and development, the majority of R & D for new drugs being funded by the public sector. Why governments don't patent the drugs discovered through such research and then sell them at affordable prices is bizarre, such sales prolonging the lives of their tax payers, thereby increasing tax revenues.

In my opinion, religious organizations should be passionately defending the rights of poor people to have access to affordable medicine.

Isn't this issue profoundly more important than whether or not gay people can get married?

They're gay. They love each other. They want to get married. Who cares? Love knows no difference.

Fire in the Blood mentions how the costs of potentially life saving drugs are becoming prohibitive for many Americans as well.

Prices keep going up, wages keep staying the same.

Another serious problem.