Slashdot Mirror

You could always ask big pharma...

Here's a Kaiser study - the$ billion dollar amount is only the R&D /FDA trial costs. What about when companies get sued by lawyers for billions of dollars for crap lawsuits - I.E. Dow chemical for silicone breast implants - bankrupted for no definite scientific evidence, and now people are using them again.

  The Vioxx lawsuit is costing Merck between 4 and 30 billion$ for some shaky scientific evidence. There were perhaps 300-400 people who doctors though had deaths DIRECTLY contributable to Vioxx - now remind you , many of these patients had crippling arthritis, pre-existing cardiac conditions, were over 70 years of age. I've had patients tell me that they take up to 4-5 times the recommended doses of pain medicine sometimes. Do you think the lawyers, or clients mention that - of course not - they want their easy money. Do you think many of those people would have died anyway? - probably.

IF you are involved in medicine, and have some money, you will get sued. Every doctor and pharmaceutical company does, and the cost gets passed on to everyone else in the form of a 65 cent pill, as opposed to a 30 cent pill. THese class action lawsuits make multi millions for many law firms, because enough people in menial jobs don't want to work anymore , and are "injured, or think they are" (actual line I heard from an ambulance chaser commercial).

Link to Kaiser/Tufts study supporting the billion dollar R&D/FDA cost per new drug below.
http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_ind ex.cfm?DR_ID=17747

Study from Tufts

http://csdd.tufts.edu/NewsEvents/RecentNews.asp?ne wsid=6

Kaiser study

http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_ind ex.cfm?DR_ID=17747

To put it in perspective Rick Perry had $24 million in contributions the same year Merck gave him $6,000. If you really think he was motivated by such a small donation you haven't seen what it takes to get things done in government.

The unfortunate truth of the matter is that the medicine is cheap and patentless. Pharmaceutical companies today are not interested unless they can make big profits, specially for something like cancer drugs.

This behavior is already taking its toll on developing countries like China and India. I understand that it is very hard to find Aspirin in India since it's cheap to make and the drug companies make very little money from it. Instead, they make aspirin variants for cardio patients which are slow release drugs, bump up the price by 1000% and make a killing.

Patents in medicine are killing people, and preventing quick access to life saving medicine. This is being addressed by some countries like Thailand, where they broke a patent for a HIV treatment drug since the patent holder was intent on ripping off the country.
http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_ind ex.cfm?DR_ID=42580

Am I a troll? No.

There are areas where the black rate of infection is very high and the white rate is very low. Nobody knows exactly why, but everyone has an opinion. I tried to give all the reasons I have heard that might make sense and that I think are most likely. Note the careful use of words like "seems" and "probably" in selected places.

The quote I saw about circumcision said there was a massive improvement, and they stopped the test early because it seemed unethical to not allow the uncircumcised participants the benefits of circumcision. I couldn't find the article I read, but I did find this, which may be about the same test, but I am not sure as I don't think the article I read said anything about it being in South Africa:

http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_hiv _recent_rep.cfm?dr_cat=1&show=yes&dr_DateTime=10-2 6-05#33323

It's all still pretty new, and I am sure there will be some arguing back and forth.

I'm not sure why you would think I am trolling. I am just telling you what I know from things I have read and from people I have spoken to, and I happen to be from Africa myself, so I tend to see things rather differently than people from outside the continent. I have no sacred cows here, and am a bit confused why someone would be annoyed by my post. Tell me, why do you think there is such a large disparity in infection rates?

Besides the comment about circumcision, do you have any other particular problems with what I said?

(Hint: Someone who says something you disagree with is not necessarily a troll, and might be willing to speak civilly with you if civilly approached)

...there are more important things, like curing/controlling AIDS, building infrastructure, and enabling access to clean water.

Five years ago, the Gates foundation recieved accolades for donating $100 million to AIDS prevention and research.

Four years ago, the Gates foundation pledged another $100 million to the fight against AIDS through an entirely different agency.

Two years ago, the Gates foundation put up an additional $50 million.

I could go on, but I'll just summarize: in the last 5 years, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given more than $600 million to an assortment of AIDS research and prevention projects. It is pretty damn clear that Gates would gladly have given more, if the research and prevention programs could have absorbed any more.

Compare this to the $29 million being devoted to developing an education instrument. The cost of the $100 laptop is a pittance compared to the costs of fighting AIDS or the other major problems of our times. Yet this $29 million, small as it is, could be of critical importance in helping the children who have been orphaned by AIDS to grow up to be literate, educated contributors to their societies and cultures.

Both Gates and Negroponte have earned high honors for their charitable works. Each is contributing from his unique strengths to making this world a better place. Neither would be able to do what the other one is doing: it is simply not in their natures. We should honor them both.

And I think we in turn should be charitable, and not pay too much attention to the all too human verbal sniping that is going on between these persons.

Neither of those things will make your health care affordable though, the only way it will be affordable is if you tax wealthy Americans more and use their money to pay for it. Which to me, just seems a bit too socialist.

Right... and any hint of filthy, filthy Socialism is far worse than letting a significant chunk of the American populace go without any healthcare or get nearly wiped out by an emergency (especially now that it's significantly harder to declare bankruptcy in those situations).

There are many ways to make healthcare more affordable. You touch on one with the malpractice damage caps for "pain and suffering" (which isn't as much of a cost as politicians like to scream about). Limiting it would help some though. You could also allow imported drugs and run the Medicare prescription drug benefit like the VA runs theirs for a significant saving of taxpayer dollars.

There are other things that you could do. You could put an end to the mass advertising of drug companies both to the public and to individual doctor's offices which is huge chunk of their costs in America. (Limiting the expensive wining and dining of doctors should come after universal coverage because a lot of poorer people get free medicine from the samples given out by clinics afterwards.)

You could reverse the Reagan-era change of law that allowed hospitals to be run as for-profit entities instead of having to be non-profits. You could force a standardization of computer data exchange across the nation to match the impressive organization of VA hospitals and save a lot of money on record keeping while preventing the a lot of accidents relating to drugs going to the wrong people as both Hillary Clinton and Newt Gingrich are advocating.

Just getting rid of the redundancies and the overhead costs of the for-profit insurance industry would bring down overall costs for the nation. Furthermore, encouraging free checkups and preventative medicine would greatly reduce the numbers of people waiting until a health problem becomes an expensive disaster that they can't avoid dealing with (which is what most poor people do). This would also avoid the use of the emergency room as your doctor that raises average healthcare costs.

We pay about twice what Canadians pay for healthcare (through taxes), and we live shorter lives on average. It's not just Canada -- every country with universal healthcare pays less and most have citizens with longer lives. What are we getting for our money? We should look to other countries for what they're doing because they're obviously doing something that we're not.

"Which will happen regardless of population control. You made it sound like that the population control would lower the value placed on human life."

You disagree on that? Then ask the baby girls in China. That is, the ones that survived the gender selection purges going on there at the hands of their murderous parents.
http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_ind ex.cfm?DR_ID=11199

Eugenics efforts also follow population control. Look up Margarent Sanger some time.

Population control is inherently about deciding who is more valuable and thus more suitable to breed, and who isn't.

"Actually, the vast majority of research - particularly in potential drug therapies - is done with public (NIH grants) and not-for-profit funds (think March of Dimes, Juvenile Diabetes, Jerry Lewis, William Gates Foundation, etc.) by universities and such."

Who starts these urban legends?

http://www.kaisernetwork.org/health_cast/uploaded_ files/Iglehart_Slides.pdf
http://www.phrma.org/publications/publications/17. 03.2005.1142.cfm
http://www.bain.com/bainweb/Consulting_Expertise/h ot_topics/detail.asp?id=22

The very last line of the article, hanging out all by itself:

Scientists might test the vaccine in an outbreak of Ebola under emergency conditions.

There was a very intruiging article in the New Yorker awhile back about just this subject: testing HIV/AIDS vaccines and other pharmaceuticals on Africans. Unfortunately it's not available online, and I wouldn't want to go into any more detail and risk being -1 Offtopic. But here's a short summary of the article.

1) There are quite a few medical break-throughs being made outside of the U.S.A. as well as in. As many or more I would say. and

2) I think the money being made is being misdirected. For example, when a drug is ending its patent protection the drug companies pump money into modifying it just enough to get a new patent. And then they spend 3 times as much money on advertising the new drug than they did on the (of dubious use... my unschooled opinion only) research.

Take the acid reducing drug Prilosec for example. When it was coming out of patent protection, the company making it (AstraZeneca) did a bit of research ( Look for this quote here: Or once Prilosec comes off patent, you need to get the docs to prescribe generic Prilosec rather Nexium, the new purple pill that has--you know why it costs so much, don t you? It s those little gold bands on there.... from the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF STATE MEDICAID DIRECTORS (NASMD) FALL 2001 MEETING) and came up with Nexium. There are many credible articles on the 'net you can find that will argue that the two drugs have near enough the same effect that it is basically silly to pay the added cost to purchase the patent protected Nexium over the now patent expired Prilosec. (See: How the Drug Companies Deceive You -- The Inside Story of Nexium as one example.) But the company has spent so much money advertising Nexium they often blind not only the public/patients, but the doctors as well.

If the companies would quit this stupid and basically useless waste of money (in a healthcare sense) then maybe your argument would be more valid. Then maybe the companies really would be funding useful research. Until then, most of the basic fundamental research where the initial discoveries are found will still be conducted where it always has been: in universities around the world, funded by governments. And then the drug companies can still take it from there... if they stop wasting money on bullshit ad campaigns.

:-) Have a nice day sir. Sorry, I have other plans.