British Columbia Bows To Breast Cancer Patent

dlek writes "Bowing to pressure from Utah's Myriad Genetics, the government of British Columbia has stopped offering a test for hereditary breast cancer. The price of the test, which looks at two genes responsible for the cancer, has tripled to $3500US. Our public health care system can't afford to pay so we're sending people to Ontario, which is ignoring the patent. People are disappointed we're not doing the same... previous Slashdot mentions are on their original claim and on the Curie Institute's challenge to the patent."

Comments

Valuing profits more than human life?

[Sheetrock]

I think we might very well have hit rock-bottom. I mean, I suppose there has always been an empowered bunch screwing over the masses to stay in power, but it doesn't make much sense that we've got enough food to eat and enough science to keep people well and we're willing to hold it all back like this.

I never much liked the need for the idea of intellectual property (although I'm hard-pressed to come up with an alternate system that'll work as well on the whole), but somehow when we're talking about lives rather than Napster and hearing the same exact story from the people who 'own' the IP (we just wouldn't have the incentive to produce if we don't have total control) it makes the whole idea sound pretty dumb.

Tough choice.

[swagr]

From one perspective, this test wasn't available a few years ago. A company spent the money and time to make it available, and now they want a return on their investment. If it was a new method of toasting bread, we wouldn't care...
but it's breast cancer detection/prevention so it's not "business" anymore. The question is: where is (or can there be) a happy balance between the pharmaceuticals screwing us, and us screwing them?

Re:Got a letter from my federal rep this weekend..

[Angry White Guy]

Nice to know that your life means absolutely nothing to the economy, business, and corporate health of the nation.
If everyone had to take even one day off all at once for cancer treatments, IP would count for shit. Why can't these people see this?

The bright side...

[MrWa]

Hopefully someone will get around to suing because the "patent" is killing them.

Re:Uh-ho!

[Idarubicin]

Patents on medical products are a touchy subject.

The problem is that this isn't a patent on a medical product, it's a patent on a gene itself. The patent holder is asserting that any test for the mutated gene falls under the patent.

They are also refusing to license other companies to test for the gene--they want to cut out any middlemen. Even if you develop an alternate test, you still can't use it without their permission (which they are refusing to give.)

This sort of patent has a chilling effect on basic research, as well. Why bother developing novel treatments that are already sure to be covered under someone else's patent? Why fund research on this gene if there's no chance of a return on investment? How do you complete your research project when you find out that someone wants royalties on the genetic material you're using?

Reverse engineered designs are patentable?

[SloWave]

Sorry, Myriad Genetics, and any other clown who thinks they own the patent to the design of my body. Just because you reverse engineered a few portions of that design does not mean that you now control whether I can look at it or not. I think some massive civil disobedience on this whole patent issue and so called IP is in order until we get some politicions in place who can fix the present corrupt system.

Absolutely!

[FreeUser]

It certainly isn't free, I'm in a ~40% tax bracket.

I'm in a 40% tax bracket in the United States, and my employer pays for my health care insurance, which isn't nearly as good as what I had in Germany when I was working as a college intern (the money my employer pays for health insurance would likely be mine as income otherwise, so it wouldn't be at all unfair to add that to my tax bracket for a more even ocmparison, in which case the United States taxes would come out vastly more expensive than most, if not all, of the industrialized world. We pay three times what the rest of the world does for comparable healthcare).

If you look at tax rates based upon what you earn, Germany (and likely Canada, though I haven't compared the numbers myself for Canada yet) has about the same tax rate as the United States for anyone earning wages in the middle to upper-middle income brackets. Yes, if you make $500,000 or $1,000,000 / year you'll pay much higher taxes in Germany (and probably Canada) than you do in the US, but how many people does that affect, and just how impoverished are the lifestyles of those so affected. Not as impoverished as the upper middle income bracket folks, who pay roughly the same in both countries, but get a hell of a lot more for their tax dollar in Germany than they do the United States. Woopty-fucking-do if Joe Corporate Exec can't afford a second yacht this year ... that is an asinine reason to perpetuate the existing, severely broken system which is clearly designed to serve the few and priveleged, subsidized by higher costs for the rest of us.

What is amazing to me is how utterly myopic we Americans are when it comes to socialized medicine. The insurance and pharmaceutical companies tell us how poorly socialized medicine works, citing one or two anectdotes (for which there are a dozen anectdotes making exactly the opposite point), but no hard evidence that socialized medicine a la Europe (including Germany's highly regulated medical insurance industry, the system Hilary Clinton wanted to emulate), and we as a people buy it hook, line, and sinker merely because anything having the dirty word "socialism" in it must be worse than the current 40% uninsured population we have now.

Not all that goes to health care, of course, but a good chunk does. Do I dislike the taxes? Yes. Would I want to lower taxes and go to a for-profit US-style system? Not on your life.

Amen. The irony is, I doubt your taxes are all that much higher than ours, if at all. We get to pay taxes to prop up Worldcom, line the pockets of Baby Bush and his cronies, and invade small middle-eastern countries at the behest of our oil moghuls instead. And we're told we should be 'proud' to be Americans. Feh.

Researchers have been mad at Myriad for years

[back@slash]

This company has already caused trouble for other researchers within the US. For those who would suggest that if there were no profit incentive this "innovation" of discovering a gene wouldn't have happened I suggest you read this MSNBC article, which contains the following two paragraphs:

In Philadelphia, a university stopped testing 700 women a year for a genetic predisposition to breast cancer because its lab was accused of violating a biotechnology company's patents.

"I'm quite disgusted," said Arupa Ganguly at the University of Pennsylvania, who abandoned years of breast cancer research after Myriad Genetics Inc. warned her in 1999 that she was trespassing on the company's intellectual property. "My work went down the drain."

The fact is that this company just got to a position 1 or 2 years before University researchers would have. While there still may have been a patent put on this information by the University somehow I doubt you would have to pay extortionist fees to do anything related with those genes even if it's just further research by universities.

Americans have already been suffering because of this insane idea that a gene that occurs within every human can become the sole property of a single for profit company. It falls within the government's responsibility to prevent this situation from happening but for that to occur you need a government that is "for the people" not for corporate profits.