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Antibiotic Resistant Staph Antibiotic Discovered
edward.virtually@pob writes "CNN is reporting that a team of scientists has discovered an extremely effective killer of the antibiotic resistant form of staph infection occuring naturally in rock pools. Unfortunately, despite the obvious cheap potential availability of this cure, do not expect it to be cheaply available. The employer of the scientists, AquaPharm Bio-Discovery Limited, the story notes 'is keeping the identity of its MRSA-killing bacteria a closely guarded secret, and taken out patents on how they can be cultivated and used.' Oh well."
...is to make make of of the sick.
Other excellent ways are weapons of mass destruction and reality shows.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I see nothing wrong with pantenting the process so long as the patent isn't abused.
Remember claritin before the FDA deemed it fine to go over the counter? It was stupifying the price drop.
I hope these people don't find the cure for AIDS. That would be one that would be ethically/morally wrong to abuse.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Why would anyone expect that a company would spend all the time and resources to discover a new cure, only to release it to the public? If they weren't going to try and make money from the effort, they would probably never have attempted it in the first place.
To quote Cartman, "Damn hippies."
There is in fact a perfectly good MRSA killer out there already - bleach. Not much use once you are infected, but an ounce of prevention, etc. Here in the UK we need the government to get hospitals to focus more on basic hygiene, rather then forcing them to hire more managers to figure out ways of fiddling the figures to meet the latest (meaningless) government target.
At least the government here have set themselves a goal of a 6% reduction in the number of targets set per year...
Help children born unable to swallow - www.tofs.org.uk
The problem is the drug should be _regulated_ not _patented_. i.e. the patient taking the drug should obtain it in a reasonable price, but he should be put in isolation in a biosafety-level-whatever center for diagnosis & treatment.
With all the complaining about how the USPTO awards this or that patent for the obvious things, it's this patenting of medicinces which I find the most anti-social. It's like, "I'm going to discover something which may save lives, but I want the ability to restrict, for profit, how it gets used." Makes me feel my healthcare premiums aren't so much an insurance policy as a licensing fee. While I feel people do need compensation for their efforts, I feel any kind of patent awarded on medicines or medical treatments should have a much limited scope. I.e. any pharmacutical should be allowed to produce the medication with a minimal fee. Otherwise we become embroiled in these debates, like africans can't afford this or that because they cannot afford it, so they die, and it's a fait acompli massacre or genocide.
And then there's the separate issue of this antibiotic: how long before staph is resistant to it, too.
The best thing I ever did to fight respiratory infections was to stop eating antibiotic laden meat.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
We live in a capitalist system. Companies that don't operate in a profit-making model die faster than staph-infected peasants. Perhaps this sucks but it's our system. If a company comes up with a miracle cure at the expense of millions of dollars, should its next move be to give it all away and go out of business? The solution is for the government to subsidize the cost of the cure so sick people can afford it. In a free market system, big business has no mandate to look out for anybody's well being. That's where the government is supposed to come in.
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
For many years, alcohol has been recognized as an excellent disinfectant. It kills germs and viruses without exception. I strongly recommend taking in large quantities of Guinness Stout or if you live in Manitoba, Canada; Fort Garry Dark Ale.
You're be helping the economy and keeping yourself safe from bioterror attack.
This has been another public service message from GrubCo.
Trolling is a art,
As a student learning in medical science and biochemistry, I believe that I can make a living researching in a university, and I can, also earn money from what my efforts deserve, YET, If it's about getting another 1 * 10^x (x being smaller than infinity), and one life is going away, I am NOT going to make it, unless the 10^x going away means I will die.
(REALITY check - will you sacrifice your life for other's? I don't.)
Just think about why we had the problem with antibiotic-resistant staph in the first place: overuse of antibiotics. While in the old days antibiotics where reserved for serious diseases, nowadays, they are prescribed for the smallest flu and the faintest cough.
Keeping this new wonder medicine patented will ensure that it will stay expensive enough that it will only be used when really needed. Or else we might get some Antibiotic resistant staph antibiotic antibiotic resistant staph...
as pointed out previously before, it should be regulated, not high-priced. If you distribute it as 100 dollars per pill/injection/etc, and I have 100,000 dollars and i MISUSE it, like donating it to some unnamed conuntries like china, without any instruction (They suffer from resistant-strain since they misuse antibiotics pretty badly), then the whole world is possibly doomed!
If I eliminate drug patents, I will also eliminate all the new drugs I was trying to make afforadable, the argument will go. Well, maybe, but it's not so obvious to me
Nice way to shrug off the core of the problem. Your rant is pretty much all fluff if you don't even address the issue. Yes, we all know that people not getting drugs to cure disease is bad. That's obvious. Any suggestions?
As a Staph researcher, I should say that it's wonderful that there's a new promising antibiotic out there, BUT we have no information on a) how effective it is on different strains of Staph b) if it's specific to Staph or to a wide variety of bacteria or MOST importantly c) if it's toxic to humans. The last thing you want is to get sicker while taking it.
So treat this more as a press release, less as a scientific discovery until the peer reviewed articles and FDA approval phases start.
Niles
I have a question for the fellow who submitted this story: do you have any info that we don't? You've gone and claimed that this cure won't be readily / cheaply available, but I didn't find that information anywhere in the article. And now everyone else has gone off talking about how horrible pharmaceutical companies are. Like it or not, they do have the right to make money. If you want to spend your life trying to find cures for diseases and give them away, all the best to you, but these companies are in no way obligated to do the same. And NOWHERE in the linked article does it say that they plan to charge exorbitant fees for their findings. It simply says that they're patenting it. Good for them. Once it's protected by a patent they can go ahead and finish their research and develop some good drugs. Then, and only then, *if* they artificially limit availability or charge ridiculous ammounts of money for it, can you judge them. But we can always hope that they'll make a fair profit on it that they can use to do more research and that'll be it.
do not read this line twice.
I read a while back that the antibiotic approach to dealing with bacteria will always result in resistant strains of that bacteria. You can mitigate the problem by ensuring people take the full course of antibiotics, but eventually resistant strains will emerge.
The article went on to note that a diferent approach seemed to be 100% effective in killing bacteria.
Bacteriophages.
Very simply if you take sample from the places that a particular strain of a bacteria is known to be present - an then alalyse these samples - you will eventually find a virus that simply eats the bacteria. Cultivate large amounts of the virus, and you can use it to kill the bacteria.
The article highlighted the Russians who, during the cold war, became quite good with Bateriophages. But that problems with patents and financing prevented the commercial exploitation
of their knowlegebase.
From what I could understand bacteriophage development is so simple, it would be impossible to make any money out of it.
Can't make any money out of it?!!?
Makes you think.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
In this case, I feel like they filed for a patent to save humanity from itself. We as a species are overusing antibiotics. They don't just go away when they exit our bodies, or when the pills, cleaners, feed and fertilizer adjuncts expire. They wash out into the ecosystem where they definitely kill a lot of bacteria... but this is the dark point.
They get weakened and find a culture that has mutated, or is ready to mutate - and it survives. Not only does it live on, but it thrives because it's competition has been wiped out.
Now when that super-bug comes back to knock on your door, it laughs at your antibiotic treatments.
I would prefer to have a certain class of treatment guarded behind intellectual property laws. I would prefer to see doses of that treatment be rather expensive, so that Joe Sixpack isn't sprinkling it on his lawn, and flooding his watershed with the substance - almost dredging out recruits for the next generation of biowars.
Instead, it should be reserved for last-case scenarios, and applied in surgical strike fashion.
- passion
"It's essentially beachcombing," said Dr David.
"We go for whatever we think is likely to be of interest. There are certain sites to look for -- basically it's down to experience."
If it is wrong to patent materials obtained in this manner there is an easy solution. Why don't you go beachcombing for the cure to the next big disease and release the rights to the world at large.
Oh wait, you don't have millions of dollars to blow scouring the world for pools of slime that probably don't contain anything, but which might contain the cure for AIDS? Neither do these guys - hence the patent...
If the person who discovered penicillin patented it, where would medicine be today?
Just where we are now - patents only last about 10 years after the product is developed enough to relase...
I don't condone price gouging by the pharmaceutical industry, but if this product is expensive and it prompts doctors to use it as a last resort, then it certainly will forstall the day when natural selection delivers us bacteria that are resistant to it.
yea i stole your sig- whats the big deal, it sucked anyway.
Its 'Antibiotic-resistant' - a compound adjective, so it is hyphenated. I had to read the header twice to figure out what it meant.
Its the same difference as 'Man eating shark' (in a restaurant) and 'Man-eating shark' (in trouble).
Baz
The last thing we want is for this to become cheap and widely available. It will have to be expensive because we don't want anyone to get it until there it is proven that a particular case of MRSA is resistant to all existing antibiotics. And then, we only want it given on those particular cases. Thus, the costs of having found it, which could have been in the billions since its the cost of every project looking for naturally occurring drugs divided by the number of successes, and the cost of figuring out how to cultivate it, purify it, and of testing it all have to be defrayed against (hopefully) no more than a few thousands of cases.
Its the fact that the antibiotics are too widely and easily available today that has caused this crisis. Now that a possible way out has been discovered, you propose to destroy it by making it cheap and widely available. Will we ever learn our lessons?
The Government DOES put BILLIONS of dollars into this kind of research. The amount of Government money in research in astounding. Many research projects split funding between the Government and the drug companies.
Save a Life. Donate Blood. Please.
The question is what kind of rock pool... People have been bathing in heated spring water pools for thousands of years with our race to become technologically superiors we have forgotten our past. Now if we can change the way that we use H/A/V/C in our work places maybe we can prevent offices & cube spaces from becoming flu factories... Why they don't install basic UV lamps inside of air ducts is beyond me, same goes for commuter and cargo transports airplanes...
Remember claritin before the FDA deemed it fine to go over the counter? It was stupifying the price drop.
I have to say I'm mostly (but not entirely) on the Pharmecuticals side on this issue. You are forgetting a few things
1) the manufacturing of these drugs *once you know how* is generally pretty cheap & easy to do.
2) Discovering these drugs in the first place is the product of some very serious, long-term, hard and *expensive* science.
3) Often finding a way to turn a discovery like this into a drug that is fit for human consumption is perhaps even more difficult and *expensive* - Penicillin was discovered in 1929 but it wasn't until 1945 that someone figured out how to use it as a drug. It usually takes several years of *very expensive* research before they figure out how to use a discovery like this as a drug.
4) Once they have a drug it takes several years of difficult and *very expensive* trials to prove it's effectiveness & safety to the FDA
5) Not all of their expensive initial research, & expensive development of drugs end up being anything.
6) The whole time they've been doing this their patent has been active and ticking down, they have a few years left in their patent to make back their enormous investment. (though they *may/may not* be able to get a patent extension that compensates them for the time it takes to get FDA approval. So, they may get at best 17 years to get a return on their investment or if they fail to get an extension they may have only a couple of years.
7) They are making drugs there is a *huge* risk even after years of *expensive* research and getting FDA approval that a drug may do nasty things to the user over the long term or to a tiny fraction of the population - the result could be lawsuits that costs BILLIONS. It is important to note that this harm doesn't have to be proven scientifically it has to be "proven" in a court of law - One scientist with a pet theory as an expert witness and a handful (out of millions) that have some unexplained syndrome and all the profits from all the drugs produced by hundreds of scientists over dozens of years may end up in the pockets of a few dozen lawyers that "worked" for at most four or five years to "earn" it.
The response to all this is that Pharmecutical companies are *very* profitable - true but they are engaged in a fairly risky investment as a matter of economics high risk has to be balanced with high rewards, otherwise the investment goes elsewhere. If they operated without any profit at all the drugs would be roughly 8-25% less (looking at last years profits vs. revenues) but that obviously woudn't take into account any risks or explain why anyone would bother to undertake the years of research outside of pure altruism - a fine sentiment but not that great as a motivator.
The other response is "if it's a life saving drug it's morally wrong to profit from it". My response to those folks is to ask them if they are willing to make such huge investments themselves without profiting from them. Would YOU be willing to go to school, get an advanced chemistry degree, spend decades of research into the slime floating around rock pools and NOT GET PAID for it.
You do have a point.
A good one.
But when push come to shove this will probably mean that the rich get the cure and the poor (as usual) gets shafted.
There's huge potential for abuse in the patent system.
I hope that won't be the case here.
But misuse of antibiotics also ranks quite high on the 'threats to mankind' list.
This patent properly handled could be a good thing.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
Disclaimer: The following applies to Canadian/US patent law. IANAUKL.
Patents cannot be granted for things occurring naturally in nature. There have been cases where researchers discovered a cure for a disease in nature, and spent millions of dollars trying to reproduce the substance synthetically. This is because they couldn't patent the original organic material, but they *could* patent a synthetic copy.
Secondly, part of patent law states that in being granted a patent, you must make the product available to the public at reasonable cost. The company that comes up with a cure for AIDS will not be granted a patent for the cure unless it is produced in a lab, and they will not be allowed to charge $200 a pill for it.
Patents are not as unbalanced as some people seem to think. They're actually a good thing. They drive research and provide incentive to invest in new medicines, while keeping the balance of ensuring such medicines will be accessible to all, not just the rich. Particularly here in Canada, where we have universal health care.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
I work in a small company offering services to the pharmaceutical (aka "life science companies").
First off, it comes as absolutely NO suprise that they are keeping this close to heart. These people keep their birthdates and surnames close to heart. The only place you can possibly find a higher level of paranoia is probably at the annual DefCon.
Second, the pharmaceutical industry NEEDS TO TAKE OUT PATENTS TO SURVIVE.
Developing one new drug costs hundreds of millions of dollars. If the drug turns out to be a complete failure near the end of the project (i.e. clinical testing on animals/humans), then they've wasted those hundreds of millions of dollars. That means they have to make a decent profit on their successes, otherwise one or two failures would send them straight out of business.
If they didn't patent and protect their discoveries that would mean some other company could just start producing the drug themselves, and as they didn't spend all that money on developing it, competitive pricing is not exactly a problem and again the inventor is driven out of business.
Either have your government use some of your tax money to fund this sort of research, or just accept the facts:
1. We need medicine.
2. Medicine is insanely expensive to develop.
3. That means it will eventually cost you.
All the people that are nagging on about how "all medicine should be freely available to everyone around the world", please take a moment and understand that if it was free then there wouldn't be any medicine in the first place. Yes the pharmaceutical industry does make a good profit, but it's needed to finance the failures.
Even if one accepts the argument that the pace of medical progress has slowed, that's not necessarily an argument against capitalism. Maybe the initial discoveries were easier? We've been working on cancer for most of this century, but most of the progress has been made recently, not back in the early days (when you believe things were done right). In fact, as the price of research becomes higher, it becomes all the more important that the medical companies have a way to make back their investment.
R&D is not free. Even if the government paid for it, people would still have to bear the cost. Instead of people who actually require the medicine having to pay, the entire taxpaying population would pay. It's up to you to decide which is more fair. Of course, another big downside of government sponsored R&D is that it would be politicized. Imagine all the fun if our elected officials had/got to decide which diseases were the important ones. We'd probably spend all our money on Alzheimer's, as the baby boomers get older.
In short, Chris Rock is full of shit.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Woah there.. Hold on, professor.
Bacteriophages are viruses that attack bacteria. They infect the bacterial cell and use it to multiply. There are many different kinds of bacteriophages and they infect bacteria in different ways. A virus is a peice of RNA inside a coating. It is not alive, and it does not eat bacteria. Like any virus, it uses the host cell to reproduce more virus.
And it's also not 100% effective against bacteria. Like an antibiotic, some bacterial cells will mutate and become resistant to the virus. Considering how many billion times the cells divide, one mutation in a million can result in possible resistance traits.
Bacteriophage development is not that simple either. Its possible to isolate a bacteriophage, but since it does not reproduce without the aide of a host cell (which it will destroy), its kind of difficult to get it to multiply and hence mutate into a form thats more virulent.
Can't make any money out of it?!!?
Makes you think.
It makes me wonder why people would imply such simple solutions to a complex problem without understanding it first.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
Huh? If it's so "simple," then that implies cheap. If it's cheap, there's little R&D to recoup. If it's patentable (as you implied with your line about the Russians. I'm not sure why the USSR cared about American patents anyway, but I'll let that slide), one can make a profit, quickly recouping R&D costs.
Assuming the article you read wasn't just totally full of shit, there could be another reason why it's not profitable. There simply aren't that many antibiotic immune bacteria. Any new drug would almost certainly be orders of magnitude more expensive during the patent period than generic antibiotics, and there's very little that can't be cured with the right antibiotic at the right dosage. If antibiotic immune bacteria become more common, then people will pay a premium for bacteriophage based medicine, because there will be no alternative. Then it will become profitable.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Even before we really started to gain mastery over antibiotics, bacteriophages were studied quite extensively as a means for eradicating disease within in a patient. The problem? They simply don't work. Study after study has shown that sufficient numbers can't be delivered to the patient, and even when they are they don't have the anticipated the effect (ie bacteria don't die). You have to remember that the human body is hella complicated, and what will work on simple media won't necessarily work in vitro. I don't remember all the theories as to why it doesn't work, but I'm pretty sure the immune system is one of them--bacteriophages are non-self. The body can't differentiate between a "good" non-self and a "bad" non-self and will quickly destroy the viruses--if they even survive digestion. Yes, there is a camp that believe that treatment by bacteriophage works, but the scientific community as a whole has nixed the whole idea as there has yet to be conclusive proof that it does.
Of course, it's not the public's fault if the facts are muddied. All too often, the media's brain-dead interpretation of "fairness" and "balance" consists of providing roughly equal time (or arguments of apparently roughly equal weight) even when that same outlet may already have thoroughly discredited a given argument. They are selling the appearance of fairness, after all. Actual fairness is as irrelevant as the *decrease* in aerodynamic performance caused by the rocket/jet fins and detailing of many cars in the 50/60's. Appearances are everything.
But to return to the pharmaceuticals companies: R+D is "a major expense" only after a tangled borderline perjurious accounting that was previously reserved for Ponzi schemes and the recording industry. Many of these ultra-expensive wonder drugs are sold for half as much in Canada, and a quarter the price or less in some parts of Europe, Asia or Africa. This wouldn't be the case if they were desperately trying to recoup genuine costs at their inflated US prices (because they'd be losing money on every non-US sale). They're just charging what the market will bear.
Further, as regards "innovation". Every week, I am bombarded by literally hundreds of ads (in medical journals, direct mailings an drug reps who barge in with no appointment, but are my sole source for "free samples" for my poor patients) for new wonderdrugs thhat are nothing more than 'me-too' knock-off. They move a hydroxyl group or a carbon atom on an existing drug, and run hundreds of tests (talk about expensive!) looking for some minute benefit over a current wonder drug (which they may also own). Almost invariably, the me-too is *less* effective or safe OVERALL than the existing drug (the lack of overall improvement is so consistent thatI sometimes think they're marketing the also-rans of the initial development effort - it would certainly be cheaper) Often the original 'wonder drug (progenitor of a new class) is itself only occassionally better than far cheaper and safer generic alternatives
Let me cite an example: in most cases, diuretics (drugs that cause you to urinate excess water) are both more effective and safer, at pennies a day, than Calcium Channel blockers and ACE (angiotensin convertine enzyme) inhibitors that cost several dollars a day -- for life! The study that proved this was one of the best and most unarguable in years, yet drug reps and execs will openly tell you that they aren't worried. "No one is pushing (marketing) cheap, safe diuretics which doctors have used for other purposes for centuries". Why do you think they market directly to patients? A few years ago, TVs and billboards were flooded with ads that didn't even specify what the drug was for, but urged "Ask your doctor". Perfectly healthy people came in, asking, afraid they were missing out on the Latest Greatest Thing.
Another example is the new anti-AIDS drug Fuzeon, widely hailed as an example of a drug whose high price ($20,570/yr = E19,000) is justified because it takes over 100 steps to prepare. Even if you accept their own figures justifying the cost, R+D was SFr 840 million ($620 million) and annual sales are projected to be $740 million per year, once hey hit full production (by which time, production costs are expected to be 10-15% of current levels)
Here are a couple of articles, for those who are still reading:
In U.S., marketing blurs into medicine
A more general analysis of the industry by the Markle Foundation (health care advocates)
Sorry for the rant.
Now we can overprescribe yet another antibiotic and thus churn out zillions of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
God, I *really* hope this is used only as a last ditch effort and is used correctly. It makes me ill when a doctor offers me an antibiotic for a viral infection.
It's just stupid to think that it is fair to allow an artificial monopoly on important discoveries because it is an incentive to develop more.
Which would you rather have?
1) A cure for AIDS (or drug-resistant staph, or whatever fatal nastiness) that costs $500,000, and a lot of aids patients cured.
2) No cure for AIDS (or drug-resistant staph, or whatever fatal nastiness), and all of those patients dead.
You only get one. Because it costs many millions of dollars to hunt up a cure for anything. And once it's found, another $13 million (and rising) to get it approved by a bureaucracy that gets dinged big-time for approving a drug that harms a few people through side-effects but not for withholding one that would save 100,000 lives a year (example: Beta blockers for preventing second-and-fatal heart attacks.)
The bright side is that they're going to try to get as much money as possible from their drug once they have it. So they won't price it so high that only five patients can afford it. Fast nickles are better than slow dimes - so (as soon as a few rich ones have been soaked to get it early), they'll drop the price and sell it to a few thousand well-to-do, then again to get the insurance companies to declare it no longer experimental, then again to sell as much as they can to the people without insurance. And they'll sell 'em cheaper in poor countries (as soon as they've sold some to any rich rulers that need curing.) Meanwhile they'll donate some to charity clinics for a tax deduction based on the high price, and hand out physician samples (to physicians who will save 'em for the people who can't afford 'em because there aren't enough samples to cure everybody). (And there's a rare-disease special approval for drugs that don't have enough market to pay for the bureacuracy's regular approval process.)
And that makes sense even to compensated psychopaths in the executive suite. But I'll tell you a dirty little secret: Not ALL the decision-makers in drug companies are money-grubbing psychopaths. Some of 'em are there because they really want to help people. But (unlike some bleeding-hearts) they're smart enough to know that, after researching ten thousand compounds to get a cure (or "treatment" - make it better without ending it, if that's all you can manage) for ONE disease, you need to make enough money to pay off the cost, and the investors, to have enough left over (or enough profit to attract more from investors) to find cures or treatments for the next two, or ten, or fifty diseases.
Most of these patents are for these which nature has spent millions of years perfecting. The first person who comes along and notices it does not deserve an artificial monopoly on a natural drug.
This system was perfected back when the way to find a new antibiotic was to hunt up plants and molds, extract their funny compounds, identify any that did something useful, figure out how to make it in bulk, and productize it. (Think "penicillin" and "{whatever}mycin".) That's exactly the financial case above, and exacty what we're talking about with this new compound. They DAMNED WELL deserve a return for the millions they spent finding this - and the other millions they spent going down blind alleys while hunting for it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
As a long-time employee in a pharma giant, near but not in the top level science, I know first hand the culture and their attitude; it is elitist and (was) very top-heavy with it's highly paid Wharton" business school managers who accounted for nothing but paperclips.
"we do nothing anything inexpensively; we are not a University" I was warned; the more expensive and shiny the better. I hated the culture and left it, the Republican-ish stewardship and snobbery; even the locals hate you if they know you are part of "that company".
As in other *required* areas of our life/lifestyle, the government(s) will be forced to take over or regulate this burden; society cannot afford to fund hyper-educated, top heavy, and expensive endeavors ala space shuttle, orphaned drugs, our highway system, etc.
...bullshit. I understand that people deserve to be compensated for their time and efforts even in the field of medical R&D, but this is ridiculous. Something with such widesweeping implications and of such potential benefit to humanity should not be patented. Fortunately, I contend that the concept of patenting something that occurs naturally is stupid on it's face. It doesn't matter how they patent it. Once the information has been disclosed it will find it's way to freedom.
There were a lot of interesting threads above arguing the right or lack of a right of a drug company to hold patent secrets and the attendent ability to set prices.
This rapidly becomes a matter of taste in morals and what a society should allow or does allow in terms of ethics.
The way pharmaceutical companies operate in many cases, is analogous to blackmail: a man walks up to a woman whose husband has a violent temper. He tells her that he has put them in a place where her husband is bound to find them very soon unless he gives her all the money she can beg, borrow or steal.
Like someone with a fatal illness, the woman has very little time to respond and has to put many of her resources into providing for her tormentor's profit.
One man is a filthy criminal. The other is a corporate hero.
It is interesting to note that when there is a sufficient pressure of national interest, governments lesson or remove the power of companies and individuals to derive profit from their inventions (see the conflict between the Wright Brothers and the Inventor Curtis over the aileron at the start of the first World War).
The key question which is only resolved by the political will of the people in control is: 'at what point do the interests of the many (alleviation of suffering, survival ), outweigh the interests of corporations and entrepreneurs?'
It's an ugly question. Not everyone has the stomach to intellectualize people dying of infection by a resistant strain so they can charge $100 for antibiotics instead of $10 but this is what drug companies are all about.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
Consider how important it is to keep antibiotics in reserve. Previously, Cipro was the last line of defense - and it was used up during the anthrax scare. There's plenty of Cipro to go around, but the usefulness has dropped significantly since the appearance of bacteria resistant to Cipro have appeared.
For those of you who don't remember biology, bacteria resistance is particularly nasty because unrelated kinds of bacteria can actually swap genes for traits (including resistance.) Thus, you could take an incomplete course of antibiotics, and end up with drug-resistant e-coli in your gut (which are harmless.) Then, you catch a nastier infection (say, a bacterial pneumonia), the nasty bacterium manages to swap genes with your drug-resistant e-coli, and WHAM, you've got a deadly infection that is resistant to all available drugs. Hospitals are particularly deadly because they tend to treat the sickest patients with the most advanced drugs... and as a result many drug resistant strains LIVE IN HOSPITALS! (Yes, this is a true fact - disinfection is a serious bitch with certain strains of bacteria...)
The longer they keep this new stuff away from the general public, the better it will be in the event we REALLY need it.
Another problem with private development of drugs is that market forces cause the development of the wrong kinds of drugs: you get dozens of redundant designer anti-allergy drugs, but less common diseases don't get addressed.
Research is something the government has demonstrated they are good and efficient at. And, in fact, a lot of private drug research is still partially supported by the government anyway.