feminishblog:

Yep. It makes absolutely no sense at all. I actually heard an argument that it would be hard for men to remember to take the chemical birth control each day, rendering in ineffective anyway, so there would be no point. Their reasoning? Because men aren’t responsible enough. Wow. If I was a man I’d be pushing for it for that reason alone. That’s incredibly insulting to men, and still leaves the brunt of the entire responsibility with the woman.

Thanks for sharing, bostondahlia! xx

~MM~

Actually, the issue is that most proposed male birth control pills have been hormonal.  The way the female pill works is by tricking the body into not ovulating by making it think that it’s pregnant.  Men, on the other hand, never naturally stop producing sperm, so it’s not quite as simple.  This means that the male methods that were suggested had to function in substantially different ways.  In the case of hormonal BC for men, most of the cases involved pumping men full of female hormones, which was causing a wide variety of side effects that tended to be far worse than the female equivalent.

Also, I don’t agree that men should be pushing for it due to insult, I think they should be pushing for it because it’s the only sensible way for men to protect themselves.  Right now, men have two choices: condom or vasectomy, both bad options.  The alternative is to trust a woman to take birth control reliably, and regardless of other things I’d rather not be trusting anyone with that.  Men should be fighting for it because they deserve the options currently accorded only to women.

More importantly, hormonal BC for men is the most useless, expensive and unreliable of a variety of methods which have been advanced, methods that the government has refused to fund or consider.  For example, heat-based, ultrasound and RISUG/Vasalgel have all been proposed.

RISUG has been undergoing tests for 15 years in India.  It’s non-hormonal, 100% effective when administered properly, lasts ten years or more, has no known side effects besides minor swelling and soreness for a day or two, can be administered in about fifteen minutes and is basically dirt cheap.  Thing is, nobody’s willing to fund it because corporations can’t make money on it and the government just doesn’t give a shit, which is kind of ridiculous considering they give about 300 million to fight prostate cancer and 625 million to fight breast cancer despite similar numbers of victims.  It’d take less than ten million to bring RISUG to market and pretty much hand basic reproductive rights to every man in the fucking country, but they just don’t care.

It’s being developed in the U.S. by a bloody non-profit.

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation was completely willing to give them a whole bunch of money….to try and develop it for women.

A few criticisms…

First I’m always very sceptical of the argument “wonder drug x isn’t being released because corporations won’t make money from it”.  Whilst there may be a  couple of exceptions this argument usually fails and is often peddled by quacks.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the reason a government doesn’t take an interest in this isn’t entirely innocent. However if a pharmaceutical company owns the rights to this treatment they stand to make an extraordinary amount of money. Lets say £100 per injection and 10 million people take it that would be £1bn. The company would probably charge a hell of a lot more than that too until their patent runs out and it would still be excellent value, think how much 10 years worth of condoms would cost.

Now don’t get me wrong, from what I’ve read the treatment sounds EXTREMELY promising but it needs a hell of a lot more testing. I’m not saying you have but I wouldn’t want anybody reading this to jump to the conclusion that this is necessary a wonder drug without a lot more evidence.

A trial of 250 men is pretty small and more testing needs to be done before it conclusions should be drawn, larger tests have ended in disaster.

I also haven’t been able to find out anything about the methodology of the trials.  For ethical reasons many new drugs and treatments are tested alongside the old method and if they show a large increase in effectiveness compaired to the old method alone they are then they are tested to see how effective they are by themselves. It may well be the case that as a standalone contraception it is only as effective as condoms.

The reversibility of the drug has not been demonstrated on humans yet, it has been shown to be effective on primates (which is an excellent first step) but it needs to be tested on humans before we can claim it is both safe and effective. Thalidomide comes to mind, it was tested extensively on animals without any adverse effects but the result of it being rushed out without adequate human testing caused the biggest disaster in medicine. There are hundreds of other examples of drugs/treatments passing animal tests only to fail at human trials.

If you have any links to more information about risug let me know. I hope it is a success and it does deserve a LOT more funding I just don’t want to jump the gun just yet.