Drug wars

So the government have now given the green light for the revolutionary drug Herceptin to be prescribed to women with early-stage breast cancer in the hope of saving 1,000 lives a year. Despite the drug already having a UK licence for late-stage breast cancer and her illness being so advanced when it was found, the drug was never even suggested as a treatment option for Mum. She was however, prescribed the new oestrogen-suppressant drug Arimidex, which received substantial press coverage in December 2004 for having shown greater success than tamoxifen at preventing cancer recurrence in clinical trials.
Mum was the sort of person who was allergic to a pill before she’d even got it out of the bottle and so it was with great surprise that she tolerated Arimidex without any side-effects whatsoever. To our knowledge, her aggressive cancer type spread to no more sites during the time she took the drug. However, about six weeks before she died, her consultant stopped her prescription. He claimed it was better if she switched to a progesterone-based oestrogen-suppressant as it would stimulate her ailing appetite. One has to ask though whether it was simply a cost-cutting measure to save the Princess Alexandra Trust £1,000 a year, as Mum’s latest liver counts had still shown severe abnormalities and perhaps her case seemed entirely hopeless to the specialists by that point. Immediately after switching drugs, Mum sank into depression, became severely jaundiced and slid into a physical decline from which she never gained a moment’s respite. When admitted into the Isobel Hospice for the last few days of her life, she pleaded with its palliative care doctor to change her prescription back to Arimidex, but her last desperate cries for help fell on deaf ears. Nothing could have saved her life by that point, but we will always wonder if she may have lived for a little while longer if her oncologist had continued with her original regime. And whether Herceptin would have made any difference to her life expectancy will forever remain a mystery: her cancer may have been of the wrong type in any case, and as Herceptin can cause cardiac problems and Mum suffered from atrial fibrillation during chemotherapy, it may simply not have been viable.

But how can a drug like Herceptin possibly cost up to £30,000 per person per year to manufacture? Are the ingredients so rare and the processes involved in its production really so delicate? AstraZeneca, who manufacture Arimidex, have just announced profits for the third quarter of this year of around $1.7 billion, a 49% increase, and, according to the Guardian, Roche, the manufacturer of Herceptin, has seen sales over the last three months rise 20 per cent to £3.88 billion, so one has to suppose not. It’s a disgrace that the pharmaceutical industry can be so profit-greedy that it can lead to the postcode lotteries and Russian roulette style of medication-prescribing that you read about in the press every other day. And this is before you even begin to consider their attitude towards the AIDS epidemic in Africa and how they will respond if and when a bird flu pandemic strikes. Pharmaceutical companies should have a moral obligation to make people – and that’s people anywhere – well, and not the priority of putting cash in the pockets of their shareholders.

REBECCA