How international patent law can harm your health

The pharmaceutical companies (Merck, Pfizer etc.) search the planet for substances (e.g. substances found in tropical rain forest plants) that are effective against disease (e.g. against cancer or diabetes).

But when they find one, they do not market it. The reason for that has to do with the law on patents. Natural substances cannot be patented.

Without the protection of a patent they would have no way of recovering the cost of searching for and testing the substance.

Similarly, substances that occur naturally in the human body, e.g. CoQ10, cannot be patented.

So their scientists seek some way to modify the molecular structure of the substance so that it is still effective against disease, but no longer appears in nature and therefore can be patented.

Then they patent the modified substance and market it.

How can that process harm your health?

It can harm your health since the modified substance may have harmful side effects. Neither our bodies, nor those of our ancestors, have encountered it before. Our genes may not equip us to deal with it.

The side effects may not be discovered for some time. In fact a risk of that happening is unavoidable. Testing for side effects when one is unsure of what one is searching for is very difficult.

An example of this was the thalidomide tragedy.

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