>A decade ago, while he was volunteering with aid workers in El Salvador, Laufer said a nurse at a remote health outpost told him she’d run out of antibiotics and birth control pills — cheap, generic medicines that even her suppliers couldn’t immediately replenish. “This is ridiculous. They should be able to build their own simple lab” to make the pills, he recalled thinking at the time.
This is pure crazy. If these drug were generic (versus patented), the problem of getting them to El Salvador is not a price problem, it's a supply chain/infrastructure/corruption and theft/political (in the case of birth control in a very Catholic country) problem. Some of these drugs are highly complex and building, supplying, and feedstocking chemicals for a lab to make them is even harder than finding the money for a $5/pop or less prescription
I would be horrified to think what kind of havoc DIY birth control pill, s that were not manufactured correctly, might do.
I would say a better solution would be to start a not for profit manufacturer, but when India produces dirt cheap genetics, there does not seem much point.
This is pure crazy. If these drug were generic (versus patented), the problem of getting them to El Salvador is not a price problem, it's a supply chain/infrastructure/corruption and theft/political (in the case of birth control in a very Catholic country) problem. Some of these drugs are highly complex and building, supplying, and feedstocking chemicals for a lab to make them is even harder than finding the money for a $5/pop or less prescription