Outsourcing animal testing.
I guess this isn't surprising. >:(
http://www.boston.com/business/healthcare/articles/2006/11/25/outsourcing_animal_testing/
snip...
BEIJING -- Glenn Rice wants to turn China's dogs into global economic assets.
Because animal rights groups make it difficult for drug companies to build or expand animal-testing laboratories in the United States, Europe, and India, Rice, chief executive of Bridge Pharmaceuticals Inc., is outsourcing the work to China, where scientists are cheap and plentiful and animal-rights activists are muffled by an authoritarian state.
"This is a country with a large number of canines and primates, and if we establish pre-clinical testing facilities here, we can change the dynamics of the industry," said Rice, who in 2004 created his San Francisco-based company out of the life sciences department at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Calif. "Animal testing also does not have the political issues it has in the US or Europe or even India, where there are religious issues as well," he said. "So now big pharma is looking to move to China in a big way."
http://www.boston.com/business/healthcare/articles/2006/11/25/outsourcing_animal_testing/
. . .
Pharmaceutical companies are malevolent creatures. You're right Lezly, it's not surprising... just extremely sad and unfortunate... not to mention disgusting and embarrassing for North Americans.
It reminds me of sleeping sickness in Africa, when the cure was an arsenic-derived injection that only 1/20 survived (collapses the vein into which you are injecting the fluid almost everytime). When a safer cure was found no pharmaceutical company would manufacture it. There was no money in it. A couple years later someone discovered that the cure was in a hair removal cream produced in New York, and because there were still no pharmaceutical companies interested in manufacturing it, they had to buy the hair removal cream to treat patients with sleeping sickness. Money is more important than lives these days.
Lezly, I am outraged, which is not an emotion I indulge in frequently or lightly. :'( Thanks for bringing this to our attention.
Definitely, thanks. Ugh.
It's gotten hard to keep track of businesses, if it ever was easy. One more example of the things that make me cringe.