EA - John Green & Grassroots Activists Pressure Danaher To Drop Price of Tuberculosis Test by Gemma Paterson

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: John Green & Grassroots Activists Pressure Danaher To Drop Price of Tuberculosis Test, published by Gemma Paterson on September 12, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Really great piece from Good Good Good on the campaign to pressure Danaher to reduce the price of their TB test. Excited to see the outcome!Tuberculosis is the world's deadliest disease - and it is entirely curable.The airborne disease has plagued human history, and the World Health Organization estimates that 10 million people across the globe are infected by TB every year. Of those millions, 1.6 million still die each year, despite the existence of life-saving technology and medicine.These are facts that enrage many - but especially author and philanthropist John Green."Why am I passionate about TB? It's the deadliest disease in human history, but for most of human history we couldn't do much about it. However, since the mid-1950s, TB has been curable - yet we still allow TB to kill over 1.6 million people per year," Green told Good Good Good."This is horrifying to me. I don't want to accept a world where we know how to cure Tuberculosis but deny millions of people access to that cure."This passion was put on display in July of this year.Through the social media campaign #PatientsNotPatents, Green and his fanbase - called Nerdfighters, or Nerdfighteria in collective form - followed the lead of TB advocates to call on drug company Johnson & Johnson to allow the sale of generic bedaquiline - a life-saving TB drug that had been inaccessible under the company's patent for over a decade.Nerdfighteria - as well as longtime TB organizations such as the Stop TB Partnership and TB-survivors Phumeza Tisile and Nandita Venkatesan - was successful, and Johnson & Johnson ended its reign on bedaquiline (though advocates are still working to ensure that all low- and middle-income countries receive access to the generic drug).To end the TB epidemic by 2030 - a goal shared by both the WHO and the United Nations - more pharmaceutical companies need to do their part to make healthcare more accessible, especially in countries with a high TB burden.So, in their effort to end TB, Nerdfighteria has taken on a new company: Danaher.The IssueDanaher is a multinational corporation, founded by brothers Steven and Mitchell Rales, that owns a number of other large companies, such as Cepheid, Pantone, and X-Rite. (Steven Rales also founded Indian Paintbrush Films, which has financed many of Wes Anderson's movies.)Most relevant to this campaign, however, is that in 2006, Danaher and molecular diagnostics company Cepheid created the most helpful diagnostic resource for TB: The GeneXpert machine.This rapid molecular testing machine is able to test for a number of infectious diseases, including COVID, HIV, TB, and multidrug-resistant TB. In fact, the WHO recommends Xpert tests as the initial test for all people with signs and symptoms of TB.The GeneXpert machine itself is cost-effective, but its testing cartridges are more costly. The company charges about $10 per regular TB testing cartridge and about $15 per multidrug-resistant TB testing cartridge (though both tests cost the same to manufacture).According to a 2019 brief from Doctors Without Borders, Danaher and Cepheid could reduce the cost of these cartridges to just $5 each - or lower - based on continuous increases in volume. The brief said a "20-30% reduction in price may be overdue" thanks to expansion in volume."These pricing packages serve to expand Cepheid's footprint . and do nothing to address the urgent need to scale up affordable testing for COVID-19, TB, and other diseases, or to address the longstanding lack of affordability and unfair pricing of Xpert tests," David Branigan, of activist organization Treatment Action Group, said in a statement in 2...