A BETTER DEAL ON MALARIA
Novartis is breaking even selling Coartem. But it chose to lose money to save more lives.
For the past nine years, the drug company Novartis has been selling Coartem, one of the most effective antimalarials on the market, to public-health officials in the developing world at a loss totaling more than $253 million - not counting the millions spent on Research & Development. That’s added up, the firm reports, to more than 550,000 lives saved. In late January, the company unveiled the first pediatric dose of Coartem – less bitter and easier to swallow than the adult version - which is expected to help in the battle against a disease that kills more than 700,000 children under 5 each year. (…) “Novartis could be making a lot more money making hypertension or diabetes medications that the people in the U.S. and Europe would buy,” says Awa Coll-Seck, executive director of Roll Back Malaria, a global partnership founded with the goal of halving the world’s malaria cases by 2010. “Instead, it’s investing real funds in finding medicines that will never be profitable.”
Though malaria is both preventable and curable, many of those in the developing world struggle to get affordable treatment, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where the mosquito-borne disease is most prevalent.
(Time, March 9, 2009)
According to the text, “affordable” most likely refers to:
