Look at some of the vocabulary you will see in the text.
Read about some of the ethical problems in the pharmaceutical industry and check your comprehension.
Aspirin – buy it in Britain or the United States and it may come in a simple box at a reasonable price. Buy it anywhere else in the world though, and you will notice that it is a commercial product of the Bayer company. This, simply, is the difference between so-called generic” medicines, and branded” drugs. Generic medicines are available to anyone who can legally manufacture them (and are thus easily available at low prices), while branded drugs can only be manufactured by one company (who can thus set the price they wish for their products).
So why is aspirin a generic drug in some countries and a brand one in others? Aspirin was originally a brand drug, manufactured in Germany by Bayer, but following the Second World War, rights to the drug were taken by the British and Americans who made the recipe” freely available in Europe and the United States.
This story is just an indication of how politics and market laws play in the world of commercial medicine. A more recent example of this is the controversy of the sale and development of drugs to fight Aids.
Drugs manufacturers GlaxoSmithKline admitted that their huge 13% rise in profits over the last year was partly due to the increase in sales of retroviral drugs to fight Aids. They have offered to work with medical charities, offering them large discounts on the prices of their medicines, but have still been heavily criticised by Oxfam and Médécins Sans Frontières. Oxfam have said that GlaxoSmithKline are overcharging for their products, and – worse - using their patents to stop other companies making cheaper versions of the same drugs. Médécins Sans Frontières have stated that they intend to use illegal” drugs (manufactured by another company in spite of GlaxoSmithKline’s patent) because they claim that an average price of $600 is too much for many people in developing countries.
Scientists and researchers in the most advanced university laboratories in the United States are now paid by private drugs companies, and the results of their research are often not spread through journals and on the internet (as used to be the case), but kept secret until the companies decide how they can make the most profitable use of the results of the research.
The whole question now seems to be how far the laws of the free market can push against the often unprofitable demands of medicine. Are producers of medicines bound by the Hippocratic oath? Or by the laws of the free market?
Now check you know the correct stress pattern to use with some of these words.
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