Drug Companies Doing Good

Since it's easy to get angry at drug companies - they profit from sickness and market inefficiencies - it's also worth noting when they go out of their way to do good:

A new, cheap, easy-to-take pill to treat malaria is being introduced today, the first product of an innovative partnership between an international drug company and a medical charity.

The medicine, called ASAQ, is a pill combining artemisinin, invented in China using sweet wormwood and hailed as a miracle malaria drug, with amodiaquine, an older drug that still works in many malarial areas.

Sanofi-Aventis, the world's fourth-largest drug company, based in Paris, will sell the pill at cost to international health agencies like the W.H.O., Unicef and the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

The rollout of the drug is the result of a two-year partnership between Sanofi and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative, a campaign started by the medical charity Doctors Without Borders to find new drugs for tropical diseases.

Doctors Without Borders, better known by its French name, Médecins Sans Frontières, has long been one of the harshest critics of the pharmaceutical industry, charging that it spent billions on drugs like Viagra, Ambien and Prozac for rich countries and almost nothing on diseases killing millions of poor people.

I'm curious to learn more about this partnership. It seems like a workable model, at least when the drugs aren't too expensive to develop. The poor get a better malaria pill and Sanofi-Aventis gets lots of good press. Considering that drug companies spent more than $3 billion dollars marketing their drugs to consumers last year, this seems like a better way to develop their brand.