Not least because it can be controlled and treated, and hasnt been. The New York Times has an editorial discussing a pill that a pharmaceutical company has decided to sell at zero profit to public health agencies in the developing world.
I don't often agree with the NYT editorials, and I don't even agree with this whole one. But if a company chooses to do something like this (whether for PR, or just our of the kindness of its non-existent heart - being just a legal construct, after all) it's worth giving them some credit.
The Editorial
An excerpt:
Paris-based Sanofi-Aventis, the world’s fourth-largest drug company, working in collaboration with a nonprofit drug-development organization pioneered by Doctors Without Borders, will soon introduce a cheap and easy-to-use pill to combat malaria in sub-Saharan Africa.
The pill combines two drugs that are already in use into a single medication that can be taken once a day for three days by young children and twice a day for three days by adults to cure the infection.
The course of treatment is notably cheap — less than 50 cents for children and less than $1 for adults. Sanofi will make no profit on sales to public health agencies and international institutions that typically serve poor people. But it will also produce a branded version to be sold in the private markets of developing countries at three or four times the public price.
To its additional credit, the company has agreed not to seek a patent on the one-pill formulation so that generic companies, like those in India, can produce the pills cheaply and add to the quantities of medicine needed to treat many millions of malaria victims around the world.
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