Antibiotic geographies and access to medicines: Tracing the role of India's pharmaceutical industry in global trade

Bjerke, Lise

doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115386

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…The 1970 Indian Patents Act reshaped drug manufacturing globally, in part by abolishing product-based drug patents, enabling generic versions of drugs to be produced through reverse engineering of pharmaceuticals in India. 26 Antibiotics have also been at the center of determining international implications of the rule of law. For example, India, Iran, and the Philippines filed suit against Pfizer for violation of the Sherman Act by establishing monopoly practices.…”

Section: Strategic National Objectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…27 India's subsequent rapid development of pharmaceutical manufacturing, combined with a US regulatory abbreviated new drug application process in the 1980s, allowed Indian manufacturers to avoid repeating clinical trials or marketing comparable generics in the United States, resulting in India becoming a current leader in world antibiotic manufacturing and the United States becoming the largest importer of their antibiotic exports. 26 Global health policy. Because antibiotics are lifesaving, ensuring access to them has been a high priority in global health policy.…”

Section: Strategic National Objectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Why We Should Reexamine the “Golden Age” of Antibiotics in Social Context

2024

AMA Journal of Ethics

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Economics is the primary discipline used to understand supply chain design, scale-up, and management. For example, antibiotics can be compared to other forms of "tragedy of the commons," whereby a common good (effective treatment of infections) is jeopardized by individual consumption and lack of community oversight and stewardship. While economic analysis can explain innovation decline in terms of market failure, one pitfall of an early-stage focus on research and development is a failure to challenge the discovery narrative. Ethics also has a distinct place in helping us envision alternatives to what markets can produce. This article advances a more contextualized view of how science and technology policy has shaped antibiotic supply chains over many years, emphasizing how shifting the story we tell about past successes is central to securing a reliable antibiotic supply chain in the future.

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Section: Strategic National Objectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Strategic National Objectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why We Should Reexamine the “Golden Age” of Antibiotics in Social Context

2024

AMA Journal of Ethics

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“…Antibiotic products can be generally divided into two main categories in trade classifications: antibiotic ingredients and antibiotic medicines (Bjerke, 2022, 2), with the former referring to APIs, raw materials, KSMs, or bulk drugs, and the latter to formulated drugs. Antibiotic ingredients are an indispensable part of the complicated global supply chains of antibiotics that are heavily dependent on manufacturers in China and India.…”

Section: China and India In Global Antibiotic Trajectoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Antibiotics “dumped”: Negotiating Pharmaceutical Identities, Properties, and Interests in China–India Trade Disputes

Zhang

Bjerke

2023

Med Anthropol Q

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China and India have become major producers of antibiotics, and the world has become highly dependent on them. Since 2000, the competition among Chinese and Indian manufacturers on key antibiotic ingredients has become increasingly intense in a series of trade disputes involving anti‐dumping investigations. Analyzing these trade disputes, we find that they provide a space of communication and contestation where seemingly objective facts about pharmaceutical ingredients are transformed into debatable subjects, which are used and sometimes manipulated by stakeholders of conflicting interests. The disputes reveal entangled configurations and multilayered stakes in the China–India pharmaceutical nexus that often defy polarized national interests. Stakeholders must juggle multiple factors, including public health interests, nationalist sentiments, and corporate profit, in negotiating the national identities and the physical and chemical properties of “standard” pharmaceutical ingredients. The disputes also highlight the coexistence of collaboration and competition among Chinese and Indian stakeholders in global pharmaceutical supply chains. [antibiotics, active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), pharmaceutical nexus, dumping, trade disputes, China–India]

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“…Current antibiotics are mainly off patent and the cost of generics is very low, with the daily cost in the range of large cappuccino in a good restaurant. Not surprisingly, most production facilities have been outsourced: the majority of antibiotics or their basic components are produced in India and China [33]. The only integrated production chain for antibiotics in the Western world is in Kundl, Austria.…”

Section: Few Pharmaceutical Companies In the Antibiotic Fieldmentioning

confidence: 99%