If you believe Chicago Tribune columnist Donna Bozzo, you’ll never see an anti-HIV microbicide on the shelves of your local pharmacy because the drug companies simply don’t care about women’s health. A more likely explanation is that women wouldn’t use it and even if they did, the company foolish enough to market such a product would get taken to the cleaners in the form of product liability lawsuits.
Bozzo writes that currently the only way women can avoid AIDS is by asking their partners to usecondoms (Bozzo forgets to note that not sharing drug needles and abstaining from sex with partners whose HIV status is uncertain are also good prevention methods for members of either sex). Bozzo speculates that anti-HIV microbicides may be viable within a few years,
But research indicates it would be possible to develop topical products that could help protect women from STDs…
Researchers are working to develop gels, foams, creams, or films that women could apply intravaginally before having sex. In theory, a microbicide treatment would protect a woman from HIV and other STDs by creating a barrier against viruses, killing viruses or bacteria on contact, or preventing virus replication.
But will such a product ever see the light of day? Probably not, but Bozzo’s reasoning is suspect.
Quoting Amy Allina, program director for the National Women’s Health Network, Bozzo alleges that pharmaceutical companies think that there is simply no market for an intravaginal microbicide, but in fact, “advocates have done surveys, including one by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, indicating that 35 percent of women would use a microbicide to protect themselves from AIDS.”
The problem with this claim is that it runs straight into reality. Women might tell surveys and focus groups that they would gladly use a foam or cream intravaginally, but compliance rates for such regimens tend to be dismal. Women simply tend to find products inconvenient and/or difficult to use and tend not to buy them when alternatives (such as condoms in this case) are available and are more convenient.
Second, given the legal environment in the United States, any company that marketed an anti-HIV microbicide would be putting itself at enormous risk. Such a product would almost certainly come with warnings that it cannot guarantee 100 percent effectiveness and should be used in conjunction with condoms and other preventative measures, but none of that would stem lawsuits from the company by women and men who claimed the product failed to prevent their HIV infection. In fact a pharmaceutical company would probably not have to wait more than a few years to begin facing such lawsuits.
Once in court, the company would face a huge predicament. Squaring off against a sympathetic AIDS victim would be bad enough, but then in order to defend itself properly the company would have to pry into the intimate details of the AIDS suffer’s sex life which would certainly not earn it a lot of good publicity. In fact I can almost imagine the first such plaintiff’s feature story on 20/20 with Barbara Walters doing the voice over about how a greedy pharmaceutical company failed to protect a nice young woman against AIDS.
Given the poor history of intravaginal treatments as well as the enormous legal liability, it should come as no surprise that there is little interest among pharmaceutical companies to create such a medication. This has everything to do, however, with the legal environment and past history of such products in the United States rather than any bias against women’s health on the part of pharmaceutical companies, who would love nothing more than to find a blockbuster product to market to any segment of society.
Source:
Politics puts some drugs on the slow track. Donna Bozzo, The Chicago Tribune, January 24, 2001.