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KEYCODE BAYER #08

various articles on problems linked to Bayer

BAYER PLANS TO BUILD ENGLISH HOSPITAL

In January the Hallamshire Hospital close to Sheffield hopes to complete negotiations on a scheme to build a replacement for an old womens hospital. This sounds good, but what most people in Sheffield dont realize is that this hospital will not be owned and controlled by the National Health Security (NHS). Instead it will be privately built and owned, one of the first of such schemes under the government's new Private Finance Initiative. A part of the hospital will be for private patients only. The NHS states that the public does not have to pay for this hospital. The reality is that in the long term the tax payer will be forking out much more. For the life-cycle of the hospital the public will be paying rental charges to meet both the construction costs and the demand for profits from the shareholders of the building consortium.

One of the companies that will own the Sheffield hospital is the drug multi-national corporation BAYER. The pathology laboratory services are planned to be entirely run by BAYER, using their own products of course.

Only the doctors, nurses and paramedics will remain NHS employees, everybody else will be transferred to the private companies involved. Like other privatizations this will lead to redundancies and pay cuts, as the new owners strive to get their required profits.
To protest, write to THE STAR, York St, Sheffield 1, Great Britain

BUKO AGAINST UNNECCESSARY DRUGS

The BUKO Pharma Campaign demands for measures to be taken against those 13 German drug companies that are the biggest sellers of harmful or unnecessary drugs to the so-called Third World. Altogether they sell 743 different unnecessary drugs. The percentage of unneccessary drugs from BAYER's whole range of goods distributed in developing countries amounts to 32 %.

SUSPICION OF CANCER: DENMARK PROHIBITS AUTAN

The Danish environmental authority has prohibited all anti-mosquito preparations containing diethyl-toluamide because the substance is suspected of being carcinogenic. Among them is the BAYER preparation AUTAN, which dominates the German market and is a big seller all around the world. The COALITION AGAINST BAYER- DANGERS demands a production freeze until potential health hazards have been outruled.

STOP FAST-TRACK LEGISLATION

The German Federal Government has presented a whole bundle of laws, allegedly to speed up the official permitting process for industrial plants. In reality these laws serve to protect investors from troublesome criticism. The "Beschleunigungsgesetze" ("Accelerating Laws") do not only allow for the implementation of ecologically harmful projects without authorizing procedure and environmental impact assessments, in addition the opportunities for citizen participation and judicial protest are also eliminated. "Stop the fast-track legislation" is the demand of a campaign launched by the COALITION AGAINST BAYER- DANGERS jointly with well-known NGOs such as BUND, Naturschutz-
bund, BBU, DNR, ROBIN WOOD and others.

"COMPENSATION" FOR AIDS VICTIMS IN THE USA

In the USA - after years of delaying negotiations -the BAYER- CORPORATION, BAXTER HEALTHCARE CORPORATION and two other companies have offered a compensation amounting to $ 600 million to those HIV-infected haemophiliacs resp. their relatives who became infected in the early 1980ies by using drugs intended for blood coagulation produced by the above mentioned companies. At that time, approximately 6.000 people became HIV-infected through the use of these products. The death of thousands of people in the USA, Germany and Japan could have been prevented, if the companies had used precautionary tests and had heated the blood, but at the time these steps were not undertaken in order to increase profits.

BOYCOTT AGAINST PESTICIDE PRODUCERS

A movement to boycott the eight leading producers of pesticides - among them BAYER, MONSANTO, CIBA-GEIGY, HOECHST, DOW and DU PONT - has formed in the USA. The protest is directed especially against the genetic engineering of crops in order to make them resistent against certain pesticides. Consequently, even higher quantities of those pesticides can be used on the farmland. The boycott targets all products as well as shareholdings. Contacts through email: davibook@cruzio.com

Translated by Elke Mertens and Nikki Zeuner