Drug development is slow and constrained by the economic concerns of the for-profit pharmaceutical industry. If the market for a new drug is modest, it doesn’t matter how big the public-health need for it is, or how solid the scientific evidence supporting its effectiveness: that drug is unlikely to get to market. There are precious few drugs developed for diseases, like malaria and Ebola, that selectively afflict the poor. Malaria sickens hundreds of millions of people every year, but since most of those victims have less than $1 a year to spend on health care, the market for new malaria
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