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`No need to fight every disease'
Panelists spar over health costs Money could help the poor instead
Apr. 14, 2006. 01:00 AM
STUART LAIDLAW
FAITH AND ETHICS REPORTER
Toronto Star


CHICAGO—The billions spent every year on medical research and medications
would be better used to fight poverty and illiteracy, a major biotechnology
conference was told yesterday.

"We can simply agree that people get old and die. We don't need to fight
every disease," said Dan Callahan, co-founder of the Hastings Center, a
bioethics research centre in New York.

Almost $80 billion (U.S.) a year is spent on drug research in the United
States, estimated Boyd Clark, chief executive of drug company Neose
Technologies Inc., who moderated Callahan's discussion at BIO 2006, an
annual conference attracting about 20,000 scientists and business people.

That kind of money could go a long way to boost the incomes of the poor, to
improve public schools and to teach adults to read, Callahan said.

"To be an adult illiterate in our society is to be unemployed and poor," he
said. "The best predictor of living a long and healthy life is the quality
of your education."

His comments drew harsh criticism from other panelists.

Ronald Bailey, a reporter for the conservative Reason magazine, said $80
billion sounds like a lot of money in a multi-trillion-dollar economy, but
"it's a tiny amount of money. We are not going to solve the world's
problems with that."

The private sector spends $49 billion a year on research while the National
Institutes of Health, the federal research arm of the U.S. health
department, spends $27.5 billion.

Dan Perry, executive director of Washington-based Alliance for Aging,
argued that because medical research has enabled people to live longer,
society has a responsibility to care for people as they get older .

With Alzheimer's rates doubling every 10 years and other chronic ailments
such as heart disease and Type 2 diabetes increasing rapidly, he said,
society cannot ignore medical research.

Of the long lives we now lead, Perry said, "The only way we will deal with
this unprecedented time in human history is if we get lucky in the lab."

Living longer is not a panacea.

Already, he said, 15 per cent of the U.S. population accounts for
three-quarters of the money spent on Medicare, a program for Americans on
limited incomes. Most of those are older people with more than one chronic
medical concern.

Callahan, author of The Research Imperative: What Price Better Health?
(University of California Press: 2003), also said money should be spent
ensuring more people have access to quality health care.

Bailey said that would only ensure "we would all have equally bad health
care."

Jocelyn Mackie, a researcher with the Canadian Program on Genomics and
Global Health at the University of Toronto, said Canadians should pay
attention to points raised by the panel.

Money spent on health care in the U.S. is the sum of a series of private
and federal decisions. In Canada's case, governments decide what will be
spent on health.

"We are definitely seeing them take money from education and roads to pay
for health care," Mackie said.

Private Canadian firms spend about $1.5 billion (Cdn) on medical research
annually. Mackie explained that access to health is a concern in Canada
because poorer people may not have private insurance and may not be able to
afford medicine but the medical system is moving from hospital care to
outpatient drug-based treatments.

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