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"Secret Serum" Used To Treat Americans With Ebola
mrspoonsi (2955715) writes with news that the two Americans infected with Ebola in Liberia and transported to Atlanta for treatment were given an experimental drug, and their conditions appear to be improving. From the article: While some people do fight off the disease on their own, in the case of the two Americans, an experimental serum may have saved their lives. As Dr. Kent Brantly and missionary Nancy Writebol waited in a Liberian hospital, someone from the National Institutes of Health reached out to Samaritan's Purse, one of the two North Carolina-based Christian relief groups the two were working with, and offered to have vials of an experimental drug called ZMapp sent to Liberia, according to CNN's unnamed source. Although the Food and Drug Administration does allow experimental drugs to occasionally be distributed in life-threatening circumstances without approval under the expanded access or "compassionate use" conditions. It's not yet clear whether that approval was granted in this case or not. ... Brantly, who had been sick for nine days already ... [received] the first dose ... within an hour, he was able to breathe better and a rash on his body started to fade. The next day he was able to shower without help before boarding the air ambulance that flew him to Atlanta.
Their lives were forever changed. One developed incredible muscles, which he used to fight crime. The other's brain was equally enhanced, but her turned to a life of crime.
Given that Ebola is currently confined to Africa, and that a relatively small number of people have caught it (less than 4000)...and these outbreaks seem to only come along once every 20 years, where was the incentive for the drug company to create this drug? Was it good timing that it has something ready to go just now. Will each dose be prohibitively expensive to administer in Africa, or it remains to be seen if WHO will foot the bill to the tune of 10's of millions $$.
secret serum? what is this, scooby doo?
It seems possible that a monoclonal antibody might have a dramatic effect on virus replication. Since Ebola makes one ill by direct cell destruction it might even make one feel better quickly. But the rash comes from bleeding under the skin (it's the same as any big bruise you might have had). It makes no sense that it should fade immediately from the administration of a monoclonal against the virus. I hope this drug is successful in a trial, but at least that part of the article is suspicious.
What's the FDA got to do with this? The drug was administered in Liberia.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
It worked for Agent Coulson.
It's only "secret" in the sense that almost all pharmaceutical research is completely ignored by the media.
If you dig around you'll find some articles about ZMAPP in no-name low-impact journals like PNAS and Science.
"Secret"
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
You put the lime in the coconut....
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Experts: Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People Away
http://www.theonion.com/articl...
This space for rent.
To quote TFA:
"It is important to keep in mind that a large-scale provision of treatments and vaccines that are in very early stages of development has a series of scientific and ethical implications," the organization said in a statement.
Which means, we haven't figured (worked) out yet the costs and payment plans for this drug, so we aren't going to use it to help those people already suffering who otherwise have no chance of survival. Let's just say they are "expendable", in the name of commerce, of course.
If anyone believes that hogwash about ensuring safety and efficacy and yada yada...well the mighty dollar beats all that.
Oh god. I'm laughing so hard I'm crying. Or am I crying so hard I'm laughing?
Why not just say sperm and get it over with!
Granted, it's not mutually assured destruction.
It's only plausibly mutually assured destruction. That should be quite enough.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The same reason the US funds a vast majority of drug research in general (at least as of now): It has the money, universities, companies, the property right protection, and other laws that enable people to spend decades working on something and then eventually getting a payday for it.
And much of the rest of the world piggy-backs on US research money and then demands that they get it at a discount or will just ignore the patents anyway. It is part of the reason drugs are so expensive in the US - the US subsidizes the rest of the world.
It would be great if there were 5 or 6 (or more) areas all working on the problems instead of very few. Europe certainly does some, but even with European contributions, their percentages are still quite small.
There's a lot of hype on this Ebola topic in the media.
Lets have some scale:
The population of Africa: 1 billion
http://worldpopulationreview.c...
Number of people to die of Ebola in the past year: 887
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
The number of deaths in Liberia alone during the last flu outbreak: 5,561
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy...
Science magazine had a good article about the drugs being developed for Ebola. One drug, TKM-Ebola, is in Phase I trials, but the FDA put them on hold because they wanted to change the protocol to protect participants' safety.
One researcher, Erica Ollmann Saphire, said that, because of the high case fatality rate, if she were exposed to Ebola, "I'd run for the freezer and ask for forgiveness instead of permission." But in cases like this, they usually can get FDA permission, under compassionate use. One German researcher got a needlestick, and they rushed the VSV-vaccine to her. But those were individual cases, in western hospitals, and they can't give an untested drug to a population in Africa (although some American pharmaceutical companies have tried that, and it didn't go too well).
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...
Science 25 July 2014:
Vol. 345 no. 6195 pp. 364-365
DOI: 10.1126/science.345.6195.364
Infectious Diseases
Ebola drugs still stuck in lab
Martin Enserink
For you suckers who are stuck behind the paywall, it had a good table that summed it all up:
VACCINES
VSV-based vaccines. Profectus BioSciences; Public Health Agency of Canada
Adenovirus-based vaccines. At least three different labs/companies
DRUGS
TKM-Ebola (RNAi-based). Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corp. In phase I trials, but the FDA put a hold
Nucleoside analog. U.S.Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases
Monoclonal antibodies. Many labs/companies
AVI-7537 (antisense-based). Sarepta Therapeutics.
Everybody who does clinical research knows that most of the drugs that work great in mice, work reasonably well in monkeys, passably well in Phase I trials, poorly in Phase II trials, and not at all in Phase III trials.
There were a few articles in the New England Journal of Medicine on the FDA's fast track approvals. They found that when the FDA started speeding up drug approvals, they started approving more drugs with life-threatening side effects that had to be withdrawn from the market.
Of course, if you're dying of a disease now, the calculus is different.
Sounds like fun. Can I dose you?
Was the original title of the short story eventually expanded to "The Stand".
Mapp Biopharmaceutical have been publishing articles about their ebola research in scientific journals since 2011. They seem to be a very secretive at all.
Maybe CNN thinks it's a secret because it hasn't been covered in the mainstream press - TMZ and Entertainment Weekly have completely ignored the company.
Difficulties faced in attempting to contain the outbreak include the outbreak's multiple locations across country borders, inadequate equipment given to medical personnel,[68] local funeral practices, and public reluctance to follow preventive practices, including "freeing" suspected Ebola patients from isolation, and suspicion that the disease is caused by witchcraft, or that doctors are killing patients. In late July, the former Liberian health minister Peter Coleman stated that "people don't seem to believe anything the government now says."
There was also an attack on aid workers who were hurrying to retrieve "freed" patients and did not explain to villagers who they were, and the Red Cross were forced to suspend operations in Guinea after staff were threatened by a group of men armed with knives.
source
Yeah, because the dude was there volunteering in Africa because he just hates black people. And of course, drug manufacturing is just SOOOOOOO simple that anyone can do it, it's just those greedy bastards(who cares who they are, anyone but you is a greedy bastard, right?) who are preventing it. Here is a clue dipshit, if developing drugs is so easy, why don't you be the hero and do it? Or would that interrupt your self-righteousness time?
Monstar L
The rest of the world does not "get US drugs at a discount." Rather, American consumers are forced to pay a lot more for each branded medication than anyone else in the world. It is illegal for us to even shop around for a better deal.
Bust those American patents, world. We need to get affordable medications out there for all.
To quote TFA:
"It is important to keep in mind that a large-scale provision of treatments and vaccines that are in very early stages of development has a series of scientific and ethical implications," the organization said in a statement.
Which means, we haven't figured (worked) out yet the costs and payment plans for this drug, so we aren't going to use it to help those people already suffering who otherwise have no chance of survival. Let's just say they are "expendable", in the name of commerce, of course.
If anyone believes that hogwash about ensuring safety and efficacy and yada yada...well the mighty dollar beats all that.
No, what it means is that if they inject somebody with a large therapeutic dose of a drug that has only been tested in mice, they're liable to have life-threatening adverse reactions, like anaphylactic shock from the mouse antibodies, and it's much easier to keep the adverse reactions from killing them in a state-of-the-art western hospital than it is in the field, where they have trouble maintaining refrigeration, and don't have x-ray machines (much less CAT scans), among many other problems.
I can't find the quote, but a researcher told Science that things work great in mice, well in monkeys, passably well in phase I trials, poorly in phase II trials, and not at all in phase III trials.
Actually, it's the pharmaceutical companies that want to speed up drug approvals in order to increase their profits, and the Clinton and Bush administrations gave them their wish. According to a few articles in the New England Journal of Medicine, every time the FDA sped up drug approvals, they wound up approving drugs that had fatal adverse effects and had to be withdrawn from the market, like that Merck COX inhibitor.
You can't make a baby in 1 month by getting 9 women pregnant.
This will be Uncle Chuck's way of getting Luddites out of the gene pool.
I found the quote:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...
Science 18 July 2014:
Vol. 345 no. 6194 pp. 252-257
DOI: 10.1126/science.345.6194.252
The elusive heart fix
Jennifer Couzin-Frankel
“In mouse studies there's always dramatic improvement,” says Joseph Wu, a cardiologist studying stem cells at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. “Once you go to a large animal study, it's moderate improvement, once you go to a phase I trial, it's decent improvement, and once you go to phase II, phase III, there's no improvement. This happens again and again and again. It's the entire field of biological research.”
Not secret at all, you could have invested in the startup that made the serum (whether the stuff even works has yet to be seen)
Flu deaths aren't nearly as sexy as hemmoraghic fever. Someone passing away while sweating and shivering is nothing compared to having your internals turn to goo. This scared the shit out of me, no matter how small of a scale ebola currently is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
How to explain it was not sent to Africa to help? The only explanation is that the drug is reserved to population that will pay enough for it.
I could not sleep at night if I made such an investment.
Apparently there are a number of vaccines being developed. None of them have reached the human trials phase, but several of them have been given to people under in emergency circumstances. The problem is that it requires an official request from the person's government as well as informed consent from the patient. According to the researcher it's hard to get either of these in the area of the current outbreak.
Cut the marketing budget and the executive salary/bonus overhead and set up publicly funded drug trials and the final costs would plummet (even counting the public money... profit and patent monopolies are massive inefficiencies in the drug "market").
Then you can afford to get back on your meds. Win-win!
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
it was untested! you're saying ok for US startup to test something that might even kill someone on some Africans, cause you know whose going to miss some dead darkies 10,000 miles away?
This was test on US patients who were medical people, who know full well the risks.
It's a lot more expensive that you think. The development networks for drug research reach into the billions. Keep in mind that when you find a compound, it has a lot of basic tests before you get to single cells, complex organism, invertebrates, vertebrates... by the time you reach mice, you're already talking about $10million+ ... researchers, grants, equipment, poorly paid graduate students. And when you get to monkeys...each monkey is $15k a pop and if any of them die, the compound almost always gets tossed, or at the least, get set back 4 years.
And when a decent drug does come out, the entire management and executive engine of big pharma absorbs all of that. CEOs make billions while grad students still barely make $35k a year. It's a sick cluster-fuck.
But those procedures and equipment needed for a high level of accurate scientific research is still expensive and it's the difference between real replicable research and snake oil
You can't make a baby in 1 month by getting 9 women pregnant.
Has this ever been clinically studied?
Good that they are actually intending to use the cure, instead of having to go through that whole "Sandman, Viper command...", "Viper command this is Sandman.." wind shear thing.
Moreover, the American government refuses to try and negotiate on price or bulk buy bargains. Australia subsidizes the cost of drugs, and negotiates aggressively on price with pharma companies since a drug on the PBS is guaranteed to ship huge quantities.
There is no reason American health programs can not do the same.
Anytime something is "publicly funded" the cost shoot up.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
As a researcher in the pharma industry: You are an idiot.
Where can I find the tens to hundreds of millions in public money needed to fund clinicals for a single drug that will most likely not get approved? That money doesn't exist, and many promising drugs die because companies run out of money. So companies have to have major profits on the few drugs that succeed- you should think about it as if you were playing the lottery, but each ticket cost you 10+ mil. High risk-high reward.
Also, a lot of cost is added by FDA incompetence. Yes, they are needed. Yes, we need to make sure everything is safe to some reasonable statistical level. Unfortunately, old rules and test requirements are never removed, so a company has to do a barrage of tests on everything, of which 90% are redundant outdated tests that nobody uses anymore.
I don't really understand the hatred for drug companies. Why is it a problem to pay a few hundred bucks for a pill that will literally save your life, but not a problem to pay thousands for your car? We need new drugs to replace failing medicines, and cure untreatable diseases. If we want to solve the problem of these diseases, we need to give a reason for people to form companies in this area, and that isn't going to happen without an expectation to get the money spent back.
</sarcasm>
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Because it might have also killed everyone you gave it to? You do get that experimental drugs do that right? There was a case just recently where 4 guys were given an experimental Phase I human trial immunobooster, and within 20 minutes 2 of them were in multiple organ failure. The 2 who were not were given the placebo.
And this was in a trial where we actually had done everything right and the animal models suggested everything should be fine (people have gone over it with a fine tooth comb to figure out what went wrong there).
Right, which is why medical treatment in the UK is so much cheaper (yes, even after you take into account taxes), than in the US.
The problem with this business plan is that infectious diseases are not 100% deadly. So you inevitably will get somebody very, very pissed at you. How lucky do you feel you are?
Because it costs 50 cents to manufacture the pill. A car costs thousands to manufacture and buy. People don't like to think of development costs.
And, in this case, bioweapon research facilities.
The reason is that Africans are not as afraid to die as Americans. I'm not joking. Fear of death is a great motivator.
Don't fornicate. Seriously, just don't do it.
I don't really understand the hatred for drug companies.
Well, since you (sort of) asked... Americans pay an outrageous amount for health care and the largest institutional beneficiaries of that are the drug companies, being the only group with double digit profits (the other beneficiaries are high salaried individuals). Defenders of big pharma's high profits usually try to wave away complaints by saying that it's necessary to fund drug research, never mind that if the money was going to research than it wouldn't qualify as profits, but the largest allotment of drug company money goes to advertising useless drugs to people who don't need them - research averages less than 20% of pharma budgets.
Then there's the lobbying: the Medicare Modernization Act forbade the government from negotiating on the cost of drugs, ensuring that Medicare pays twice as much as other groups for common drugs. This was essentially a $200 billion gift the the pharmaceutical industry passed under the pretense of "avoiding socialism." The United States is the only country in the world which both allows drugs to be patented and does nothing to limit the cost of those drugs. And speaking of patents, we have the drug companies to blame for the death of every attempt to pass patent reform - they need strong and indiscriminate patents for foreign markets since many countries, the poorer ones in particular, need drugs but can't afford the licensing. It's funny, but the reason why we have all the problems with software patents doesn't really have anything to do with software.
Oh, and also there's the whole thing about killing people for profit. Remember Vioxx?
Oh, come on...
The potential of the drug was discovered in January by the US and Canada. There have been months of people dying in Africa but they don't say a word. Then when two westerners get sick all of a sudden they have the exact amount of medicine needed? Because they didn't hold some back, did they?
Did they contact the WHO and told them that they had an experimental drug that might help? After all, it's been named an epidemic so you can be sure they would have listened. African nations tend to have much milder regulation of medical trails, did they contact those nations and tried to work something out? Getting the drug tested early at a reduced cost would increase their ROI so it would make sense, wouldn't it?
It's not like the west haven't done medical research in africa before.
That's the story my friend not the possibly poor condition of medical research on the African continent.
http://www.mappbio.com/ebola.h...
http://www.mappbio.com/zmapinf...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
As another researcher in the pharma industry: reread your post. Your entire post is only highlighting how poor of a job pharmaceutical companies do at effectively bringing drugs to market, all while adding the inefficiency of a 20% profit margin. The emphasis on profit alone also leads to too great of a focus on evergreening and low risk projects.
I've worked in a university lab that brought two (while I was there) drugs from design, synthesis, and screening through animal testing for the cost of an R01 ($250k) each. I realize that the clinicals are more expensive, but even $10M/drug is pretty small change compared to posted phama expenses. It's the bloat above the $10M per drug that makes them so expensive.
Hatred for drug companies comes from the (at least perceived) extortionate nature of the business. People feel as if their health is held ransom for another person's profit. Hospitals share the same ill feelings. It's especially potent because the people who profit the most from the whole scheme are already obscenely wealthy. Buying a car doesn't have the same "life or death" aspect to it.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Oh, and because I didn't realize neavs's bias at first, a couple more links:
NPR, and BBC.
What we really need is a human body simulator, down to the molecules.
I don't read AC A human right
How much would two doses of a drug help Africa?
"And while many of its people and countries are not well off at all, there are some nations that are doing quite well financially, and should be able to create the infrastructure (including organizations and facilities) necessary for such research."
Have you ever lived and worked in Sub-Saharan Africa? If you had, I don't think you'd be asking this question.
You can't make a baby in 1 month by getting 9 women pregnant.
I'd gladly volunteer to test this hypothesis if the most likely outcome weren't 9 babies in 9 months.
> You can't make a baby in 1 month by getting 9 women pregnant.
But it sure is fun to try!
The same people who develop drugs elsewhere in the developed world, that's who. Switzerland, for example, has a research-intensive pharma industry rivaling the US in size, and it prospers just fine without having to screw its citizens with fixed prices and special laws against shopping around.
What I want to see is a pharma industry that operates like that other industry that has a special need to invest such a large percentage of corporate operating budget into research and development - electronics. Somehow Intel manages to keep cranking out new processors at steadily increasing ratios of functionality to price, and yet still reap billions while its customers freely shop the world market for the best bargain. Why can't Pfizer do the same without having to wheedle special legal privileges from Washington?
Not for much longer, after the slimy corporate toady bastard Conservative party wankers we have in power executed laws that absolve the state of their responsibility to provide healthcare and break up our NHS (our public property, bought and paid for by our taxes) for the purchase of their moneyed mates, so they can get some of the crumbs from their table.
It's also shit like taking colchicine, which has been cheap and generic for years, doing a little extra research (which arguably was useful) and then using that status to bump the price up by 15 times.
Those people taking the drug couldn't give a shit about the research - they take the pills, their gout gets better, that's their own personal research right there. What sticks in their craw is that their pills now cost $5 apiece.
That and the systematic hiding of research that is negative or equivocal, the deliberate creation of medicines that are just a couple of atoms different from an existing one, not because they'll be better but because they'll be on patent, etc, etc.
Big pharma does a lot of good, but it's kind of like picking gold coins out of a midden.
Technically, aspirin is a generic name in the USA, plus Australia, France, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, Jamaica, Colombia, the Philippines, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, because (no kidding) Germany lost World War 1. In countres where it is still trademarked, the word should be written with a capital A, as Aspirin, the way you used it. The correct way to write the trademarked Johnson and Johnson wound care product is Band-Aid, with the dash.
But surely, even if some of the ACs above are a bit confused, that's not because someone still spends money on marketing brand names like 'Band-Aids". Surely they don't spend anything much on them, Let's see, for 2012, Johnson and Johnson claimed consumer wound care products resulted in sales of about 1 Billion US dollars, even, out of about 67 billion totak. Total advertising was 2.3 billion, so if we assume consumer wound care doesn't get a disproportionate share, that's 'only' approximately 34 million dollars a year. I don't think I'd call that next to zero. I will leave researching the budget Bayer spends for advertising Aspirin to most of the world, and specifically Bayer brand Aspirin (as it's described in the US and some other nations to get around that pesky genericness) as an exercise for the reader, but I have done the math, and it's actually larger than for Band-Aids.
Who is John Cabal?
it was untested!
Given that Ebola has 9 chances out of 10 to kill you, I suspect you would bet on the untested drug.
set up publicly funded drug trials
Publicly funded = higher taxes.
In the US any mention of tax increase means that everyone is up in arms about it. All the screams of "socialism" start, etc...
I honestly do not believe this would ever work.
Do you have a citation to this claim?
I have traveled to South Africa often and have friends and colleagues that were born and live there. Although the subject never came up, I do not believe they are any less afraid than myself.
Most medical patents aren't American. America has more medical research than other single nation, but by capita many European countries does more research and holds more patents especially Switzerland and Denmark. As such those countries are also interested in seeing the patents protected, though they haven't allowed themselves to be nearly as abused as the American healthcare system.
One of the points of classical Capitalist Econ 101 is that, if a particular sector of industry consistently makes more than the average profits of business as a whole, tremendous, inexorable, possibly literally transhuman forces, (sometimes called the invisible hand) will push it back into line with the rest of the economy.
When a sector is making a 20% profit against an average for businesses of only about 3.4%, then classic Capitalism would say the forces trying to steer that sector back into line with the rest are about like a bunch of Mind Reading Giant Anime Robots, piloted by D&D 23rd level wizards and led by the Archangel Gabriel, doublewielding Nuclear Powered Uzis and riding the love child of Samatha Stephens and Hellboy.*
Which makes it really bizarre to see people defending the sector's record profits as though they believe fervently in this free market/invisible hand stuff, but think the problem can be solved by debating with those people on Slashdot who 'just don't understand'. Yeah, shooting straw wrappers at him will stop Godzilla, too. How does it feel when the same theory that tells you it's morally right to defend this enormous profit margin also says the forces acting to take it away are literally more powerful than the combined nuclear arsenals of all the nations?
Of course, you could believe that Adam Smith missed something there, but if that's so, where does this sense of absolute moral rightness, and the resulting tremendous need to fix all the people who disagree, come from?
* to use a metaphor that should be clear to the typical Slashdot reader.
Who is John Cabal?
Caution : The women will not be pretty.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
I'd have thought your UID number too high to know about that one.
Hey! I thought exactly the same thing when I saw someone with a 5 digit UID quoting Shakespeare the other day!
set up publicly funded drug trials
The VA health system and the National Institutes of Health already sponsor and pay for some of the biggest, best-designed and most important randomized controlled clinical trials.
They tend to be trials that answer questions doctors need answered, rather than the ammunition the drug companies need for FDA approval and marketing campaigns.
For example the VA studied a lot of drugs used in heart attacks, so that cardiologists would finally know which ones were effective. They compared prostate cancer drugs. They compared surgery for colon cancer and found out why some hospitals did better than others. In many specialties of medicine, the experts refer to "the VA study" which was the definitive word on a treatment. A lot of the VA studies find that the standard, expensive, dangerous treatment is ineffective.
There are a few drugs that drug companies are totally responsible for, but most drugs come from government-funded academic research.
Anytime something is "publicly funded" the cost shoot up.
Which is why the Canadian health care system costs half of that in the US, and gets the same outcomes with high consumer satisfaction.
http://www.openmedicine.ca/art...
Open Medicine, Vol 1, No 1 (2007)
Home > Vol 1, No 1 (2007) > Guyatt
Research
A systematic review of studies comparing health outcomes in Canada and the United States
Costs in commercial labs are actually much higher than costs in university labs.
There was an article in the New England Journal of Medicine about the test for PKU.
It was first developed by some academic researchers, They made some prototype test kits, but they wanted it to be used as widely as possible, so they signed a distribution contract with a commercial company who presumably could do it more efficiently.
The commercial company had startup problems, so the academic researchers started distributing their own kits, in somebody's FDA-certified basement. I'm recalling from memory, so you'll have to check me, but they sold their kit for about $6.
Then the commercial company went into production. They sold their kit for $100. The PKU charities were very annoyed, because they had funded it and now it was unaffordable.
Where can I find the tens to hundreds of millions in public money needed to fund clinicals for a single drug that will most likely not get approved?
One hundred million dollars is the price of 4,000 JDAM bombs. For comparison, US military buys about 10,000 every year.
Make drugs (three of them), not war!
Intersting idea - how are you planning to sell this idea to the US military?
Sorry, you are going to have to explain how "the rest of the world" buying a branded, 100% genuine, drug for a fraction of the US price drives up the price in the US. You also might give an example where patents are being ignored in those same markets.
Here's a recent example of a man being charged $3,766 for Zovirax cold sore cream in hospital. The same product could be bought in Walmart for $181.66 . UK price $7.
http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20140728/GJNEWS_01/140729484
Drug prices in the US are entirely down to the insane US health system.
Actually what you see here is very well understood. You are seeing an inelastic market; that is if a drug or procedure will save you life, it does not matter of it costs $5 or $5000, you will find the money to pay for it. The reason why socialized healthcare drives costs down is because the government / the insurance company will bargain on your behalf. Since they are not the one who is going to die, they can not be extorted and can pit different drug makers against each other. Health care is one of the few areas where "the free market" does not work as naively expected.
Wut? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... Look at the number of companies in European countries. Belgium has 14 and is so much smaller than the US. All we hear though is how US companies buy our innovative startups and move them to the US when they are on the brink of creating a new medicine.
Of course, this ignores the reaction of onlookers, who are given a clear message that they're worth nothing to their society, and as such don't owe it anything either. I wonder if a nation facing such a problem might turn to exaggerated forms of patriotism as a desperate attempt to win loyalty where none is deserved, such as making little kids swear their allegiance every morning?
Free market doesn't really seem to work anywhere anymore, seeing how economy is always in a crisis, unemployment has apparently become permanent fixture of it and even employed people can't afford the lifestyle of their parents without getting into debt.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Thats it? You look at the number of wars and based on that number you came up with such a far-reaching conclusion?! Don't you think that is just plain stretching it?
People who are afraid of dying generally avoid going to war.
Do you honestly think it is that simple?!
Everyone is afraid of death: No matter the nationality or social status. But you may not have a choice.
Majority of conflicts in Africa are civil wars. They are not fought because "They are not afraid to die, so they just go and kill each other". Every conflict is different and complex. Civil war in Darfur resulted from government segregating non-Arab population. Civil war in Somalia is so complex that I don't think anyone understands an exact cause.
To say that "Africans are not afraid of death" because they are suffering through internal conflicts is dismissive, ignorant and downright inhumane.
That's because the Free Market Worshippers' great faith in the Invisible Hand is misplaced.
Q) How many Free Market Economists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A) Free Market Economists don't change lightbulbs, they write their papers in the dark while waiting for Adam Smith's invisible hand to change them.
As yet another researcher in the pharma industry: bullshit. Big companies go after projects that are lower risk with their own money, but I've seen quite a few experimental drugs for smaller issues or for higher risk projects be funded by startup companies, usually by companies founded by researchers out of universities. The base research was done by a university lab, and the final push and trials is done by a company and funded through a combination of VC money, some NIH grants, and funding from large pharma companies. Just this year in San Diego Lumena Pharmaceuticals raised a Series B of $45M to fund trials for several treatments on rare liver diseases. If this company makes it through trials, it'll be bought by a bigger pharma like J&J who will then distribute it.
This is where the higher risk pharma work is being done.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lumena-pharmaceuticals-raises-45-million-in-series-b-financing-249420571.html
You put the lime in the coconut....
And then? Inject it? Snort it? Maybe drink 'em both up?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Why is it a problem to pay a few hundred bucks for a pill that will literally save your life
Probably because most of the world can't afford that. In fact millions in the US can't afford that, especially if they need a long course of treatment. It's basically telling them "we have a cure, but you are too poor, sorry". Rightly or wrongly I can see why they find that upsetting.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Right,an example of medical thoughtfulness, is bringing the sick with Ebola to the USA. By a hospital group,known for cutting corners on safety. Attached to a College, never a place like plum island. Secure study facilities. Yes, sounds safe to me.
Every year there are fewer drug companies,why. The companies have new owner, merged worldwide and when they merge, they shut down the american operation, re... And move overseas, american drugs meant pure drugs, correct formulation. The companies went to Switzerland. and China. Switzerland, illegal to investigate problems, China deadly to investigate problems. Which is worse?
the truth of this super gigantic global conspiracy of everything.
The cost just goes up in the USA.
Public funds go to some private corporation.
That corporation is linked to to some politician (through family or just bought off) who helped get the deal.
All other corporations were locked out of the offer/bid.
A well-built car can last 20+ years at the cost of ~$10-20K (maintenance and fuel included, your mileage may vary) and facilitates a larger area with which to look and keep employment, with the option of displaying a sense of style for paying a bit more. In other words, a car can actually reinforce a higher standard of living and often is an optional expense. A long term prescription is often a matter of life and death that is extorted into a forced money sink that you must either pay or die that also brings with it a stigma that there is something quite literally wrong with you...that can also drain your bank of about $10-20K+ over the same 20 year period.
Thereby proving the point that branding and marketing are not what makes medicine expensive. Monopoly powers granted by the government does that.
Have you seen how much money they pour into marketing to doctors and administrators?
Well yes. When your goal is to bring a service to an entire population rather then the highest profit margin, it ends up costing more. Public funding is for cases where private enterprise can not handle the needs, it serves a different goal then corporations.
Hatred for pharma companies is easy to understand just by looking at a single metric, US prices in comparison to prices in other countries. There's an ongoing myth that American drugs are given away to the rest of the world, this act of charitable beneficence being paid for by high domestic prices. Actually, pharma companies make money in every single market in which they sell, regardless of the pricing in that market. The market bears a lot less in Mexico than it does in the US but manufacture/advertising/distribution costs are lower, so pharma still makes money in Mexico even at those prices that seem so low to US border shoppers.
There's no discounting in that much-discussed Canadian market, either. The Canadian system is single payer: the health organization puts out bids for large quantities of each new drug, and accepts corporate offers from around the world that it considers a good value. Canada has no magical powers to force US drug companies to sell for less; if a US offer is too high for a given drug, the Canadians just skip that medication and take a better offer for some different compound elsewhere. Because of the lower advertising and distribution costs of single payer, US companies can sell for less to the Canadian system and still make money.
The US pharma mess is the result of a generations-long monopoly culture in medicine, which today contrasts so sharply with the open-market mindset of the electronics industry. Electronics companies have the same advertising and distribution costs, the same very high R&D fraction and operate in the same legal system as pharma. It's the difference in industry culture that makes the pharma consumer experience so horrible.
The real question is: why isn't Intel buying laws to increase their profits and protect their turf? Everybody's doing it. It's how business gets done in this country.
How many of these African countries have consistent electricity and running water.. and you're talking about medical research?
the current outbreak is the worst in about 40 years.. BUT the mortality this time is 50-60% vs. 90% in previous outbreaks. it appears that progress is being made and there's no indication of direct US assistance in that effort (but I'm sure there are American doctors and American dollars going to the WHO to bolster the effort.
USAMRIID is part of the Army - they research infectious diseases and try to find vaccines/cures in case someone weaponizes something like smallpox (very real possibility since it just loves humans and is transmitted through the air.)
I'm sure if the Pfizers and Mercks of the world put their heads together, they could find a solution, but with only a couple thousand cases, it's not profitable.
Bottom line is the only people interested are government entities - with very large military budgets - there aren't a lot of those in the world.
read Hot Zone and Demon in The Freezer - both non fiction. Hot Zone is about Ebola, Demon is about how the US Responds to biological threats (this is covered http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
interesting and terrifying at the same time.
It's not a secret. The Slashdot headline is bullshit.
As to why this is not being widely distributed, Google TGN1412, which was another monoclonal antibody treatment for another disease.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Adam Smith spoke of "goods" and "bads" but only one gets mentioned. There is supposed to be no downside to unfettered capitalism so long as it's not getting inflicted on you by a competitor - if it is then you get the government to step in and block those evil people that didn't go to school with Washington insiders.
Rants aside there seems to be at least three promising post-infection Ebola treatments that researchers have been testing on animals or are about to test. One is similar to the post-infection rabies vaccine in some way. If one of the works out well I'm sure "big pharma" will pick up the work from that publicly funded project and spend the money to develop it into a product. That's still a considerable sum even though their role these days is mostly product development while the public is footing the research bills.
true if you're talking about AIDS.
no big Pharma is researching Ebola because hardly anyone has it (compared to erectile disfunction, HIV, high blood pressure, cholesterol and sleep disorders).
How many universities in this country even have BSH4 facilities to study these kinds of things? Are they even allowed to have these pathogens - think physical security - not Chemturion suits (brand name for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...).. but armed response for the perimeter. USAMRIID certainly has guns close by if not onsite, and I'm sure CDC can have tanks parked out front in minutes if necessary... what if the bad guys get the smallpox stored at the CDC?
the WHO only officially allows 2 facilities in the WORLD to store live smallpox.. so if you can't get your hands on the material. you can't study it.
of course you could always find some in a cardboard box at the FDA. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07...
Google TGN1412 and you'll get your answer.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Health care is one of the few areas where "the free market" does not work as naively expected.
Registered Libertarian but completely agree. The market for lifesaving treatment is not the same as the market for Oranges. Dental work for the most part is not life threatening and works pretty well on free market principles, heart surgery on the other hand does not.
I wish that were true. It sure looks like the US funds a vast majority of drug marketing, though.
But for completeness sake, here's some counterpoints.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
It's more than three, actually, if you go for the "not war" part. 10k/year is the current rate; it was 30k/year at the peak of Iraq and Afghanistan. And, of course, that is just a single piece of inventory in US arsenal, and not the most expensive one by far.
And it doesn't need to be sold to the US military. It needs to be sold to US taxpayers.
When Swiss drug companies (Novartis, et. al.) sell in the US market, they can take advantage of our pharma-lobbied laws to screw us over in exactly the same manner as domestic companies. You need to go overseas to start seeing the advantages of an open drug market. And no, we are not "subsidizing drug costs for the rest of the world." We occupy a bubble of high prices enforced by our legal system.
World's most profitable pharma company: Pfizer
2013 Net Sales: $51.6B
2013 Net Income (profit): $22B
Profit as a percent of sales: 42.7%
R&D as a percent of sales: 13.3%
World's most profitable automaker: Toyota
2013 Net Sales: $168B
2013 Net Income (profit): $16.2B
Profit as a percent of sales: 9.6%
R&D as a percent of sales: 4.1%
World's most profitable tech company: Apple
2013 Net Sales: $170B
2013 Net Income (profit): $37B
Profit as a percent of sales: 22%
R&D as a percent of sales: 2.6%
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
That's because cocaine trades in a free market. Despite the high distribution costs of a recreational drug, you're getting the best deal possible in a competitive market.
Not everyone is afraid of death to the same extent. An atheist, who believes that there is no life after death, would tend to be more afraid of death compared to a religious person who believes that after death he would go to a better place. Think about it. If you believe that you would go to a better place after you die, why would you be afraid to die? What's there to be afraid of?
Don't fornicate. Seriously, just don't do it.
Your sophisticated comments reflect the upbringing of a child of four cross-breed parents that work in the toad fluffy market (a subculture of the deviate porno market.) . and has been damaged spiritually, emotionally, cognitively, psychologically, and genetically. Probably like your four parents, I must suppose that you can only find useful work working on other non warm-blooded species. BTW.. Not sure why you think the parent writer is a female, as most female mammals have a vagina which primary purpose is for coitus. But maybe, I can only suggest, that you don't know what they are or why they are used. You may have spend too much time with the flogs.
Then why do all the big name drugs originate in the countries where people are allowed to keep what they earn?
... and people with prostate cancer in the UK are twice as likely to do from it compared to the same group in the US.
And why you can't get medication for blindness in the UK until you are blind in one eye.
There is no reason American health programs can not do the same.
Actually there is a law against that."The 2003 Medicare law* prohibits Medicare from negotiating drug prices, setting prices or establishing a uniform list of covered drugs, known as a formulary."
*: full title "Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act"
src: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04...
What? After getting approval for widespread use, most drugs only last 1 year before the generic brand shows up.
Would you invest millions of dollars to make a 20% profit for a year?
If profit is so ineffecient, why haven't any Soviet bloc countries or China allies produced any wonder drugs?
And, incidentally, are you working for free?
You got the moola we can rid you of the Ebola.
You know its become mainstream when CNBC is talking about Germ zapping robots with a headline of The war against EBOLA
Here is an article with 25 facts that the mainstream media is not always telling you. I found, No 15, interesting, a map showing the 20 CDC Quarantine Centers. They, the CDC, are/have been preparing for a very good reason just in case.
Almost each fact has links, facts number 1 thru 10 most will find disturbing. With links to multiple articles by different health organizations around to world, such as Doctor with out Boarders, who stated on June 21, 2014 EBOLA was out of control, and the World Health Organization (WHO)back in April said the Guinea Ebola outbreak was challenging. The infection killing 50%, the incubation period being as short as 2 days or as long as 21 days is a heck of a warning...imagine someone coming back from a mission trip to help others, walking around for 2-3 weeks before realizing they are infected.
For those falsely reporting that the virus requires physical contact, your wrong as the 2012 study proved (Fact No 11) article about animals in separate cages contracting the virus without physical contact. Worrisome is the doctor treating the two Americans (who quarratined themselves at the onset of symptoms) also became infected and you would have to be a moron to assume he (other 100 health workers Fact No 5) was (were all) exchanging bodily fluids with his (their)patients, other doctors treating patients. Perhaps one or two were exchanging bodily fluids, but all 100, no way, not in those circumstances as they understand the risks.
Full Disclosure:
The site may be a wee bit alarmist, however facts are facts.
The site with the 25 facts also tries to be a little political as if one president, Democrat or Republican, is solely responsible, pleeesse. So just ignore those facts with a political slant. See my political soapbox comment at the end.
The site also suggests military conspiracy, who knows, take those with a grain of salt as well. As a couple of family members who served had said, GI stands for Government Issue. Its not like IF our men and women were being used as guinea pigs that they could say No, they can not. Or as my Flight Surgeon family member agreed, if the study is double blind, the Doctor does not know with 100% certainty what they are injecting the veterans with, in the immunization. So read and take at your own risk, but for GIs, you have no choice, you must partake...your Government Issue as soon as you sign on the dotted line and swear the oath. Just comes with the territory.
(stepping up on my shoebox) Now YOU POLITICIANS....
I just wish those that focus on the political, would stop electing politicians that say they support our veterans, when the opposite is true based on VA funding, medical and phschological budgeting for treatment of our returning veterans. Let us start being as insistant that the people we elect to office budget for all the expenses associated with sending men and women to war. All our men and women who served (our veterans) SHALL get proper medical and mental treatment when they return from war, period, end of discussion.
To me it seems like the height of incompetance that politicans do not budget for the medical and psychological expenses associated with returning servicemen and women. How many wars have we been involved in? What do you mean you can not budget for this? I call BS on that crapola.
So POLITICANS, before sending more men and women to war, darn it, budget
Do you mean this clinical trial?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
but it sure is fun to try
As another researcher in the pharma industry: reread your post. Your entire post is only highlighting how poor of a job pharmaceutical companies do at effectively bringing drugs to market, all while adding the inefficiency of a 20% profit margin.
Emphasis added
Notice that said "bringing drugs to markets," not the basic funding for preliminary basic research into the actual discovery and isolation of the basic drug and/or drug interaction, which continues to be funded (95+%) by the federal governments of the G8 nations.
Then being granted a 18 or 20-years monopoly (from patent file date admittedly, not marketing approval date), if you successfully complete the marketing research without killing too many test participants. Although for any "successful" to "blockbuster" drug the entire pre-approval expense including administration and marketing is more than recouped by double in the first year of sales.*
The cited book ($800 Million Pill) is not the only ones to criticize and rebut the $800 million dollar figure which is oft-touted in the media, actually comes from the DiMasi's 2001 paper The price of innovation: new estimates of drug development costs.. Thought even the Wall Street Journal notes "[f]or instance, only $403 million of Dr. DiMasi's $802 million total are actual out-of-pocket expenses. The rest is an estimated cost of capital -- or the return that investing the money at an 11% rate of return would have earned over time." Non-executives-types would call it fudging the numbers.
* The $800 million pill book by Merrill Goozner.
Actually what you see here is very well understood. You are seeing an inelastic market; that is if a drug or procedure will save you life, it does not matter of it costs $5 or $5000, you will find the money to pay for it. The reason why socialized healthcare drives costs down is because the government / the insurance company will bargain on your behalf. Since they are not the one who is going to die, they can not be extorted and can pit different drug makers against each other. Health care is one of the few areas where "the free market" does not work as naively expected.
Why then does the government not step in? A similar industry, in terms of how important its end product is, is farming. Agriculture in the USA gets huge subsidies to provide cheap food for the masses lest they starve. Ironically perhaps, the poor nutritional quality of many industrially manufactured foods products that result from an abundance of cheap raw materials (many of which are perfectly fine foods in moderation, but not as an entire diet), packed with starches and corn syrup with flavourings and fats added to trick people into liking them, is probably the leading cause of the need for drugs.
The hatred of the drug companies or any company(corporation) is just the hard liberal/progressive left rally cry. They hate private business, they hate competition. No one should make money
Stop mischaracterizing socialism and go back to fondling your copy of Atlas Shrugged. Socialism is founded on the principle that people should be able to make money; people should be compensated for good work with decent pay. Did you ever notice an abundance of leftist political parties throughout the western world with names like "Party for the Unemployed" or "The Union of Shirkers"? No, most of them have names like "The Labour Party", or "The Worker's Party", because they are founded by and seek to look after the people who do most of the work.
Here is one of the best articles on the Ebola outbreak that I have found todate, it covers most of the fact points, while focused on the recent outbreak, enjoy. Has a map of the world showing countries involved with current outbreak.
How deadly Ebola has spread across the globe: Health officials try to trace 30,000 linked to death of American victim - as Nigerian film star sparks outrage by fleeing Africa in a mask on first-class flight
Perhaps your premise is accurate but that does not explain why the same drugs cost overseas a fraction of what they cost in the US? When I say same drugs, I mean same drugs. Same manufacturer, same brand same dosage.
I can definitely recall (vaguely at least) a handful of BAYER Aspirin ads, that would of aired in Canada over the last 30+ years.
I wonder if "Aspirin" is the one drug in Canada that's more expensive than the US...
Well the thread is completely shifted to religion now. Once again: It is not that simple. But it is an interesting topic.
Doing a google search on this is worthless: Every link is biased one way or another. It is either a religious preaching site or an atheism preaching site. Quite annoying how militant people are regarding this topic.
In my opinion a religious man would be much more scared of death, because then according to his beliefs he will be judged. And if his choices and behavior in life were not good enough, (At least in Christianity) he will be condemned to eternity of suffering.
Do you feel anxious before an exam or an interview? Now think about about life in the scope of following the religious teachings: It is impossible to follow it to perfection and no way to tell what will be held more harshly. So one is never sure if he/she would pass. Especially when you don't know when you actually die.
Now for atheist it is much simpler: Oblivion. After you are dead, there is nothing else. You just cease to exist. It is sometimes insightful to ponder non-existence before existential despair begins creeping in.
While this seems scary, the atheist is free from worrying about being stuck in a fate-worse-than-death. Death itself is scary on its own (Mostly because it is rarely clean and quick. By definition there is no pain afterwards, but quite a bit just before), but after that there is a guarantee of no more suffering.
Intel doesn't have to spend tens of millions on processor trials with a Federal Department of Technology before it can market its processors.
That would be the one. Saw it in new scientist a while back. There's been a few others. Someone at my university volunteered for a medical trial and as a result contracted a tumor which eventually proved fatal. You can't say "experimental" and expect sick people to actually comprehend the risks.
they claim to be able to trust in their invisible sky fairy to protect them from diseases (bullets, communists, whatever), but when they find themselves in shit, they call for the best drugs science can develop, despite science being the total antithesis of the invisible sky fairy that they have faith in when the weather is nice.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Re do that with R&D as a percent of profit, and the R&D for pharma drops, comparitively. Cars and electronics are lower margin, so greater sales is needed for the same profit. Toyota spends more on R&D in both real numbers, and as a percent of profit. Apple is still in last place.with R&D being only 12% of profit.
Learn to love Alaska