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HIV Vaccine
The Sexecutioner writes "WebMD is reporting on a new vaccine which has had an incredible effect in clinical trials. The vaccine, composed of human dendrites holding dead HIV viruses, has dropped test patients' viral load by up to 90% in one year. Could this be it?"
It would be nice though.
DAMN YOU OCTODOG! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
I always hear about vaccines involving "dead" virus material. But I thought viruses weren't alive in the first place; that they were essentially protien envelopes containing viral DNA or RNA. Can anyone explain?
LOL... look at the FDA's wonderful load of crap lately.. how many drugs have been pulled that the FDA said was ok? give me a break... the FDA in my opinion has turned into a load of shit...
and to add to that look how the government was trying to stop people from getting their drugs from canada.. and yet when the flu vaccine had a shortage here who did they get more vaccine from? oh yes. canada.. who's drugs you can't trust...
Kyle
http://www.unlogikal.net/
Don't forget the Billions the drug corps spend on Ads in the US. Most countries do not allow such advertizing and someone has to pay for it.
However, the biggest reason drugs are cheaper in Canada is because per capita income is about 20-30% lower in Canada than in the US and there are drug trade barriers between the two markets. If there were no barriers, then the prices would equalize across markets since one could buy a drug in Canada and sell it in the US. But with barriers, drug companies can easily set different prices in different markets, charging their richer customers (US) more than the poorer ones (Canada.) This is a classic monopolist tactic known as differential pricing. Ultimately it is the lower income caused by socialism in Canada and free trade barriers between the countries that cause such a large price disparity.
... now all you need is a "machine" to combine them! Think about the possibility of a drug which, after injected, ties itself to the dendritic cells and starts hunting in your blood for dead viruses, then replaces itself with the dead virus body -- hey, you've just produced a vaccine!
The bottom line is that now that the positive effect is demonstrated, the next step is to find out the cost-effective way to combine cells and dead viruses, preferrably in-viro. Let's hope that someone will manage to do it!
Paul B.
Well the real cause for concern with the latest scandal with drugs and the FDA is a fundamental problem of pharmaceutical companies continually trying to reinvent the wheel by making new drugs to treat highly common cronic diseases with treatments that are just as effective already ( eg long term prevention of heart disease, athritis, obesity, depression, sleeping disorders), with often a "me to" approach of producing new drugs that work similary to drugs from another company (notice the explosion in erectile disfunction drugs after the introduction of viagra.
In the case of vioxx, the treatment was designed for anti-inflammatory pain relief in arthritis, by inhibiting an enzyme COX2. It is about as effective as another drug many of us have taken ibuprofen (Advil) for this purpose but instead of being 3-5 bucks for a bottle of 50 to 100 pills, it was sold at ~$2 a pill (it is also how aspirin works to relieve pain as, thus the running joke that the pharmaceutical companies had invented the $2 apirin).
So what was so much better about vioxx that it was developed, FDA approved and prescribed by doctors.
Well it doesn't inhibit another enzyme COX1, like aspirin and ibuprofen do. Inhibiting Cox1 has several effects, the two most important are: the negative effect, gastrointestinal problems like stomach bleeding and ulcers; but it also has a positive effect which is prevention of blood platelet aggregation which prevents blood clots, heart attacks and strokes. This is why aspirin is taken to prevent heart attack, if you take aspirin to prevent heart disease and a specific COX2 inhibitor for arthritis like vioxx together you are really losing the benefit vioxx had over ibuprofen.
Anyway not everyone has a sensitivity to asprin and Ibuprofen, there are estimate that only 8% of those prescribed Vioxx actually got a benefit over cheaper alternatives, but vioxx had a great ad campaign that convinced everybody that they should "ask" (read demand) their doctor to prescribe it, even though it is vastly more expensive. Also the FDA approval could be pushed through because of the "benefit" to those 8% of patients that had gastrointestinal sensitivity to aspirin and ibuprofen.
So what have they found out now- well just inhibiting COX2 by itself actually causes increased blood platelet aggregation and increased risk of heart disease and stroke, this effect is balanced out by the inhibition of COX1 in aspirin and ibuprofen etc. that prevents platelet aggregation.
Now the real issue, Vioxx was pushed out to compete with very cheap, safe and well charactised drugs (so we know all the side effects etc., why do you think you can buy them at the supermarket) due to a very long history of use. Patent it and get it approved for use by the FDA targeting it to one small specific group that have a problem with current treatments to help push the approval through. Once it is approved marketing it to a much wider group of people that are not the specific target group, and will not gain any benefit over a cheaper, better characterised and now known to be safer alternative. To compound the problem the TV advertising of prescription drugs now almost approaching saturation increases this problem by getting the public to demand drugs they don't need.
Well ... as currently operated I would say they are very similar to a seriously malfunctioning socialism. You do understand that I was talking about an ideal insurance company, or should I say, the principle of insurance. Insurance companies in the United States today have more in common with organized crime syndicates than they do with socialism. So while I'm pretty much a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist I wasn't actually making a negative comment about socialism.
... it was wrong. She immediately called the insurance company's hotline to point this out. The answer was, "Well, we pretty much have to go with what the hospital tells us" and by God they paid it! I've had a number of similar experiences: these people just don't seem to care about overbilling and so forth. That leads me to believe one or both of two things. A. that they are so flush with money that they simply don't care or B. there's some conflict of interest going on between the management of the hospitals and that of the insurance companies.
But you're right about the odds. The only organizations that invest more in actuaries and statistical monitoring of their clientele than casinos are the insurance companies. Incredible, really. And, I guess, successful: the amount of money these companies rake in is truly phenomenal, and as health care delivery gets poorer and poorer they take in more and more.
Some years ago my girlfriend's father had to go in to the hospital for an MRI. No big deal, in and of itself, but after he was released and his wife was reviewing the hospital bills, she noticed that the insurance company was being billed for not one, but TWO MRI's, at the same time on the same day! Sure, it wasn't their money, exactly, but it did count against their liftime cap. And besides
My own father, some years ago, was in the hospital after a minor heart attack. He was only there for two days, and had some minor tests done (EKG, etc.) and a couple of X-rays and the rest was just for observation. The resulting bill was over thirty - thousand - dollars. The list of charges was almost an inch thick! Well, we decided to fight that one, and camped out in the outer office of the hospital's accounting department. After several hours going up the chain of command, we got to speak with a very, very nice woman who was the chief accountant. We explained that were disputing, well, pretty much almost all of the charges. She said, well, let's see what we can do. She went down the list, item by item, and asked "Did you see this doctor?" "No." "Did you have this test?" "No." It was MIND BOGGLING how many people and companies got some juice money stuck on his bill. By the time we were done it was less than five grand. An afternoon well spent, I'd say. But you can see why I have very little patience with the entire industry.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.