Corporate Social Responsibility with HIV / AIDS Drugs :: Social Responsibility Essays

Each year, just three diseases kill 5.4 million deal worldwide. Malaria kills at least one million, mainly in ontogeny countries, with 90% of the deaths in Africa. Tuberculosis causes 1.9 million deaths a year, almost all of them in developing countries, where resistance to the five major anti-tubercular drugs is spreading. Some 400,000 of the tuberculosis victims are also HIV positive. The yearly death toll for HIV/Aids is almost 2.5 million, with near 1.8 million concentrated in the Sub-Saharan Africa The Times Higher 20/07/01 Assess the responsibilities of the pharmaceutical companies for providing low cost drugs to the poor people in the developing countries. There is no generally accepted interpretation for corporate social responsibility (CSR), although various theorists have attempted to surmise one. One useful exposition is provided by Archie Carroll (1979) The social responsibility of business encompasses the economic, legal, ethica l and discretionary expectations that society has of organisations at a given point in time Another definition is offered by Kok et al The obligation of the firm to use its resources in ways to benefit society, through committed participation as a member of society, winning into account the society at large and improving the welfare of society at large independent of direct gains of the company. An alternative definition by Frederick et al (1988) business and society are interdependent and co-exist, with business using societys resources and, in turn, fulfilling economic needs and changing social goals Thus, business and society are skip by a reciprocal social contract which is seen as the core idea of corporate social responsibility These definitions encapsulate the notion that business has a responsibility to society as a whole, aside from the basic profit maximising ideas dictated by traditional free-market theory. in direct contrast from the ho ly economic sense of increasing shareholder wealth (Friedman, 1970) that it is a fundamentally a subversive doctrine. In the pharmaceutical industry has ia system that produces drugs in two categories. Category A would include drugs for conditions like