Americans fighting drug war quietly

WASHINGTON, Oct 9: It has now become a habit for the Americans to drive down to Canada or Mexico to get the prescription drugs- the antibiotics at nearly 50 per cent of costs. The irony is that most of these drugs are manufactured by american companies which are forced by the Canadian and Mexican authorities to lower the prices.

It is a sort of a drug war fought quietly by Americans. They climb aboard buses and head across the border in neighbouring Canada or Mexico where they can buy prescription drugs at prices cheaper than back home.

I have been to Monreal three times last month says a 79-year-old Luci Lee who is recovering from cancer and has trouble walking. I think it is a shame how much the drugs cost in America, she said in an interview to the Washington Post. The last time she took the ride to Montreal she bought a bottle of cancer drug, Tamxifen for 34 dollars.

It costs around 245 dollars near her home in Vermont, USA. She bought some cholesterol medication zocor for 60 dollars in Montreal, the small bottle costs over 100 hundred dollars at home. The money saved, she said is the difference between soup and solid food.

The prohibitive cost of prescription drugs has become a major election issue and figured prominently in the television debate between the Presidential candidates, Mr Al Gore and Mr George Bush last Tuesday. Canadians are now worried over the impact of the large scale buying of drugs by Americans from the bordering states and its impact on prices in their country.

The basic reason for low prices in Canada is the Government’s firm policy that manufacturers cannot charge excessive amounts for patented medicines. Canada’s approach to health care in general is that it cannot be left to the market forces. It has constituted a Price Review Board which oversees the cost of drugs.

The agency regulates both prescription and over-the-counter drugs to make sure the prices never rise at the rate faster than the Consumer Price Index.

According to drug regulations in Canada, the US drug companies are obliged to sell to the Candian wholesalers at lower prices compared to the domestic market.

The Washington-based Drug Manufacturers Association opposes price control on drugs. Market driven prices are needed to cover the huge cost of developing and testing new drugs. (UNI)

‘Baby fund’

KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 9: An ethnic Chinese clan in Malaysia will set up a 50 million ringgit (13.2 million dollars) "baby incentive fund" to reward members who have more than three children, a news report said today.

The federation of Kwong Siew Associations of Malaysia promises to pay 2,000 ringgit to any member who has a fourth child or more.

The Cantonese-speaking clan is believed to be the first ethnic Chinese group in Malaysia to come up with a cash incentive scheme to help check falling birth rates among the country’s Chinese minority.

Ho Sai Chong, the president of the clan, said it has received numerous calls about the cash reward.

"The response is encouraging, but it also reflects that in whatever matters that the Chinese pursue, they think of their own benefit. This includes having babies," he was quoted as saying by the star daily.

Ho said the clan had obtained promises of cash and other donations from Chinese associations and companies to help raise money for the fund.

"The 2,000 ringgit is not much. Sometimes, it can’t even cover hospital expenses," he said.

The 50 million ringgit fund would cover the birth of 25,000 babies. The clan has 80,000 members.

Ho said the clan’s plan was also in line with the Government’s aim to increase Malaysia’s population to 70 million by 2020. Currently, Malaysia has 23 million people of whom slightly over half are Moslem Malay, while ethnic Chinese form a third. (DPA)

Hawking passed over for nobel - scientists
call prizes outdated

LONDON, Oct 9: Amid mounting criticism from scientists that the nobel prizes are outdated, a published report has cited inside sources as saying one of the world’s most famous living scientists, Professor Stephen Hawking, has again failed to capture the nobel prize for physics.

Despite receiving great acclaim for popularising cosmology with his book "a brief history of time", the Cambridge University Professor has been overlooked by the swedish judging panel, which will announce the winner tomorrow from a list of 10 or 15 finalists.

The report in the sunday times yesterday said he is understood to have been ruled out because his work is deemed to be purely theoretical and remains unproven.

Anders Barany, secretary of the nobel committee for physics, was quoted as saying: ‘’i am often asked why hawking has not won the prize. He has done fabulous work but we are not yet sure that it really applies to nature.’’

Hawking, 58, is best known for his theories about the formation of the universe, which he believes was originally no bigger than a pea.

He claims it existed in this state for a fraction of a second before the "big bang" about 12 billion years ago created time and space.

The wheelchair-bound scientist, who suffers from motor neurone disease, a crippling illness of the nervous system, has more recently expounded a theory about black holes emitting radiation, referred to as Hawking radiation.

Although the nobel judges have no policy on the relative merits of theoretical or experimental discoveries, there appears to be an unwritten rule that theorists receive the prize only when their work has been verified experimentally.

"Stephen hawking is a good example," said Barany.

The administrators of the nobel prizes reportedly are considering significant changes to the annual awards amid criticism that they no longer reflect modern science and that they focus on obscure discoveries.

A report in the Sunday Telegraph said that the royal Swedish Academy is rethinking the physics, chemistry and medicine prizes.

The awards have been made since a 1901 bequest by Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, which stipulated that they be given to scientists who had "conferred the greatest benefit on mankind" in the previous year. Recipients have included Einstein, Rutherford, and Crick and Watson.

A growing number of academics complain, however, that the three categories in the prizes fail to reflect the cutting edge of science, which is now advancing rapidly in areas such as astronomy and genetics.

Critics add that the Academy’s insistence on limiting the prizes to just three individual researchers for each award fails to reflect the fact that many breakthroughs come from the work of huge teams of scientists, the Sunday Telegraph reported.

One British nobel laureate, who declined to be named, was critical of the sheer obscurity of recent nobel-winning research, especially in physics.

He said: "there has been a tendency towards a loss of perspective, a lot of nobels have gone for discovering some particular particle that, looking back, might not seem too crucial. There’s a sense of a bandwagon at work - of a private community thinking that its own work is very important."

Sir John Maddox, emeritus editor of the science journal nature, in whose pages much nobel prize-winning work has first been published, said that the nobels should now be completely reformed.

He told the telegraph: "the problem is that science has gone beyond the nobel prizes, my real worry is that they do not have the right criteria. The good of humanity is rarely being served." (DPA)

Medicine prize to kick off nobel awards week

STOCKHOLM, Oct 9: With V S Naipaul and Salman Rushdie among the top favourites to win the coveted nobel prizes, the winner in the field of medicine would kick off a week of prize announcements culminating with the prestigious peace award.

The prizes, each worth 9 million kronor (dlrs 215,000), are always surrounded by speculation. The suspense for the literature award usually the first announced was heightened last week when the Swedish Academy failed to reach a decision, leaving the timing of that announcement uncertain and bumping medicine into the top slot.

The winners of the prizes for physiscs and chemistry will be announced tomorrow and for economics the only one not established in nobel’s will on Wednesday in Stockholm. The peace prize is to be announced on Friday in Oslo, Norway.

Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel left only vague guidelines in his will establishing the prizes.

The only public hints available are for the peace prize. The 5-member awards committee never reveals the candidates but sometimes those making the nominations announce their favorites.

This year that includes US President Bill Clinton and former US President Jimmy Carter for wide-ranging peace efforts, as well as former US Senator George Mitchell for his efforts to resolve conflict in Northern Ireland.

Other reported nominees are former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari and former Russian Premier Viktor Chernomyrdin for their Balkan peace efforts; South Korean president Kim Dae-Jung for promoting good relations in Asia: and a town, northern Albania’s Kukes, for accepting 150,000 refugees during the Kosovo conflict. (AP)

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