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Fire In The Blood Essay

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Fire in the Blood
Film Critique
Fire in the Blood is a shocking, powerful and a gripping documentary about how corporate laws and greed unnecessarily affect millions of lives around the world. This compelling and honest documentary directed by Dylan Mohan Gray brings forward the face of giant pharmaceutical companies and how western government aggressively blocked access to low cost life saving Anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs) for the countries of Africa, Asia and global south.
Since 1981, AIDS-related illnesses have taken 30 million people into its trap. And that is not all. Millions of people worldwide are now living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. In 1996-1997 there was a treatment breakthrough: The AIDS cocktail drug- HAART (Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy) could cut viral load to undetectable levels. But very few people had access to this treatment. Only 1% of the million African countries with HIV received the treatment. Why? Mainly because of very high prices of ARVs and international patents that didn’t allow the drugs to be manufactured at cheaper prices causing mass destruction.
The main problems that are highlighted in the documentary are high prices of the drugs (which lead to higher deaths), Restrictions on imports, patenting of drugs (cheaper generic drugs couldn’t be manufactured) and monopoly by big pharmaceutical companies ( leading to higher prices of life saving drugs) and players at stake were Pfizer, Cipla, Private Companies and generic drugs

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