ABSTRACT
In the past five or six decades the progress made in humankind's ongoing war against disease has been nothing short of remarkable. Illnesses which only 20 years ago were regarded as death sentences can often now be cured by swallowing a pill three times a day for a week or so and never missing a day of work while doing so. In some First World countries the citizens are lucky enough to have a universal health service, like the NHS in the UK, and thus each patient only pays a fixed contribution to the cost of any prescription required. But it is in Third World countries that the neoliberal financial rules by which corporations live condemn many, especially among children or the elderly, to unnecessary death. Numerous independent studies and investigations show that the world's largest drug companies' R&D spending claims are misleading and overblown, and that they spend much more on marketing than on R&D for new products.
