tisiwoota

To follow up on Brazil’s threat to override patents on AIDS drugs– after some delay, and despite counterthreats from the Bush administration, it looks like Brazil will actually follow through:

A bill to issue to compulsory licenses on three AIDS drugs has been passed by Brazil’s lower house, and will now be considered by the Senate.

“The bill is part of an effort by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to increase accessibility to AIDS drugs in the country and limit the dominance of patented drugs. Sixty- three percent of the 1 billion reais ($409 million) the government spends a year to distribute AIDS drugs is used to buy three patented medications, Gouveia said… One of the patented drugs purchased by the government costs 9.7 times more than its production cost.”

As one of the strongest developing countries, Brazil’s case will have significant implications for the ability of developing countries to likewise defend their right to take measures necessary to protect public health.

If I could make days last forever, If words could make wishes come true, I’d save every day like a treasure and then– darn. Wrong ‘T’ word. We still haven’t invented a way of storing Time in relivable increments… but researchers have figured out how to put trust in a bottle– or more precisely, the hormone with regulatory control over that particular emotional response.

Researchers found that individuals who sniffed oxytocin were significantly more trusting with their money in an investment game than those exposed to a placebo.

The positive implication of this research is that it could lead to treatments to help people with conditions such as social phobia and autism, who are often overly suspicious and apprehensive in their interactions with other people.

On the flip side, there are concerns that such trust-inducing technology could be misused for political or commercial ends.

Though this study dealt only with trust in bartering contexts, since oxytocin is one of the hormones most closely associated with pair-bonding, there are also implications for how such a treatment might affect responses in dating situation (And if voles are a good indicator, women are likely to be somewhat more responsive to the treatment than men).

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[More on the neurobiology of love here]