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Article: Prescription panic: How the anthrax scare challenged drug patents.
- Article from:
- Reason
- Article date:
- February 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Reason Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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BEFORE SEPTEMBER 11, U.S. policy toward pharmaceutical patents was clear: The interests of the patent holder came first. However, the anthrax scare that surfaced in October has managed to shake that policy to its roots. By the time the shaking was done and the original scare had subsided, Bayer Corporation, the Pittsburgh-based American subsidiary of the German pharmaceutical giant Bayer AG, had managed to hold onto its patent monopoly over the manufacture and sale of the powerful antibiotic ciprofloxacin, now familiar to Americans by its brand name, Cipro.
How that happened provides a lesson in how both public health issues and certain types of intellectual ...