The Sunday Telegraph also reported that “the Cairns-based medico who helped spark the RU486 debate, Dr Caroline de Costa, is working flat out to try to get around the effective continuing ban on the drug by the pharmaceutical industry.”
Perhaps, then, it should come as no surprise that Dr de Costa appears in the media in association with RU486 on another frontier: the contraceptive market. The Australian newspaper of March 29 2006 carried a prominent article on the testing of a new contraceptive pill that is a low-dose version of RU486, enthusing that it “holds the promise…of eliminat[ing] pre-menstrual syndrome” and “reduc[ing] the risk of breast cancer”.
According to this article, “Professor de Costa helped spark the RU486 debate by writing to the Therapeutic Goods Administration last year, seeking approval to use the banned abortion drug.” She said, “I think now that we no longer have the ban, we will start to see it be tested for various uses.”
Later in the article, the drug is touted as having the potential to treat various conditions - treatments for which it was not designed. Never mind that all of this is glorified guesswork.
Is it possible that this positive coverage of RU486 is simply a ploy to change the image of what has been correctly called “the human pesticide”? Advocates of the drug are desperate to repair the bad image which makes it unappealing to the major pharmaceutical companies who import drugs for Australian consumption. Dr de Costa seems likely to import the drug privately on a small scale, but we can be effectively prevent the wide distribution of RU486 by a pharmeutical company.