cure for disease?

[buzzbombtom]

at the rate we are populating the world should we really be looking to cure disease's like cancer and AIDS? what are your thoughts?

 

[RonJ]

Yes we should. We would miss the grand opportunity to over saturate the Earth with people if disease kills us first.

 

[Mr. Jollypants]

Never happen. The pharmaceutical corporations will never allow it to happen, they make billions off of diseases and such.

 

[RonJ]

Never happen. The pharmaceutical corporations will never allow it to happen, they make billions off of diseases and such.

There's no such pharmaceutical company conspiracy because there's no need for it. When one disease has been controlled, there will soon be a new one to take its place. Nothing is static.

 

[buzzbombtom]

i was facebook when a friend was talking about susan g coman race for the cure talking about all the money his team had raised, got me to thinking how much we have spent as a world on just breast cancer and still have no real tangable results. hell we put a remote controlled car on mars a camera out past pluto dug a tunnel under the ocean between two land masses

hubble costs about 1.5billion
mars rover round 1 cost about 300 million
each year the about 1 million is spent on breast cancer alone.

just a thought

 

[Mr. Jollypants]

There's no such pharmaceutical company conspiracy because there's no need for it. When one disease has been controlled, there will soon be a new one to take its place. Nothing is static.

It's not a conspiracy, it's truth. When do you know of a corporation that makes billions of dollars, and just closes it's doors because it's product isn't needed anymore. They do whatever it takes to make sure their product is needed.

Breast Cancer is a good one to take since it's the most common. One in four cancers. National Cancer Institutes budget only does 5% for Breast Cancer. More than one in four cancers diagnosed this year will be Breast Cancer. So more than 25% of all cancers diagnosed this year will be breast cancer, but yet it only gets 5% of a companys budget.

Did you know that National Breast Cancer Awareness Month was created by a drug company (currently known as Astra Zeneca), who not coincidentally produces breast cancer treatment drugs? The whole Breast Cancer Awareness industry is a HUGE ONE.

 

[Mr. Jollypants]

each year the about 1 million is spent on breast cancer alone.

It's more than that. National Cancer Institute gives 5% of it's budget, or 100,000,000. Still, 5% of it's budget. It's still a huge industry, but it's not doing much for the CURE, it's spending A LOT on the prevention.

 

[Hecz]

at the rate we are populating the world should we really be looking to cure disease's like cancer and AIDS? what are your thoughts?

why wouldn't we be looking for cure to diseases? is the real question.

 

[RonJ]

i was facebook when a friend was talking about susan g coman race for the cure talking about all the money his team had raised, got me to thinking how much we have spent as a world on just breast cancer and still have no real tangable results. hell we put a remote controlled car on mars a camera out past pluto dug a tunnel under the ocean between two land masses

hubble costs about 1.5billion
mars rover round 1 cost about 300 million
each year the about 1 million is spent on breast cancer alone.

just a thought

All good points, but cancer is obviously a much more complex problem to solve than sending a robot to a nearby planet. Our knowledge of basic physics and existing technologies make space travel just an intense engineering feat. In contrast, our understanding of cells in the body and how they go awry to cause cancer is still incomplete, though amazing progress has been made. Expect to see mind boggling progress in the next 10 to 20 years on this front.

 

[Mr. Jollypants]

why wouldn't we be looking for cure to diseases? is the real question.

$$$.

This is the story of one of the great unspoken scandals of our times. Today, the people across the world who most need life-saving medicine are being prevented from producing it. Here's the latest example: factories across the poor world are desperate to start producing their own cheaper Tamiflu to protect their populations – but they are being sternly told not to. Why? So rich drug companies can protect their patents – and profits. There is an alternative to this sick system, but we are choosing to ignore it.

To understand this tale, we have to start with an apparent mystery. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has been correctly warning for months that if swine flu spreads to the poorest parts of the world, it could cull hundreds of thousands of people – or more. Yet they have also been telling the governments of the poor world not to go ahead and produce as much Tamiflu – the only drug we have to reduce the symptoms, and potentially save lives – as they possibly can.

In the answer to this whodunnit, there lies a much bigger story about how our world works today.

Our governments have chosen, over decades, to allow a strange system for developing medicines to build up. Most of the work carried out by scientists to bring a drug to your local pharmacist – and into your lungs, or stomach, or bowels – is done in government-funded university labs, paid for by your taxes.

Drug companies usually come in late in the process of development, and pay for part of the expensive, but largely uncreative final stages, like buying some of the chemicals and trials that are needed. In return, then they own the exclusive rights to manufacture and profit from the resulting medicine for years. Nobody else can make it.

Although it's not the goal of the individuals working within the system, the outcome is often deadly. The drug companies who owned the patent for Aids drugs went to court to stop the post-Apartheid government of South Africa producing generic copies of it – which are just as effective – for $100 a year to save their dying citizens. They wanted them to pay the full $10,000 a year to buy the branded version – or nothing. In the poor world, the patenting system every day puts medicines beyond the reach of sick people.

This is where the solution to the swine flu mystery comes in. Ordinary democratic citizens were so disgusted by the attempt to deprive South Africa of life-saving medicine that public pressure won a small concession in the global trading rules. It was agreed that, in an overwhelming public health emergency, poor countries would be allowed to produce generic drugs. They are the exact same product, but without the brand name – or the fat patent payments to drug companies in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands.

So under the new rules, the countries of the poor world should be entitled to start making as much generic Tamiflu as they want. There are companies across India and China who say they are raring to go. But Roche – the drug company that owns the patent – doesn't want the poor world making cheaper copies for themselves. They want people to buy the branded version, from which they receive profits. Although not obliged to, they have licensed a handful of companies in the developing world to make the treatment – but they have to pay for license, and they can't possibly meet the demand.

And the WHO seems to be backing Roche – against the rest of us. They are the ones best qualified to judge what constitutes an overwhelming emergency, justifying a breaching of the patent rules. And their message is: Don't use the loophole.

Professor Brook Baker, an expert on drug patenting, says: "Why do they behave like this? Because of direct or indirect pressure from the pharmaceutical companies. It's shocking."

What will be the end-result? James Love, director of Knowledge Economy International, which campaigns against the current patenting system, says: "Poor countries are not as prepared as they could have been. If there's a pandemic, the number of people who die will be much greater than it had to be. Much greater. It's horrible."

The argument in defence of this system offered by Big Pharma is simple, and sounds reasonable at first: we need to charge large sums for "our" drugs so we can develop more life-saving medicines. We want to develop as many treatments as we can, and we can only do that if we have revenue. A lot of the research we back doesn't result in a marketable drug, so it's an expensive process.

But a detailed study by Dr Marcia Angell, the former editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, says that only 14 per cent of their budgets go on developing drugs – usually at the uncreative final part of the drug-trail. The rest goes on marketing and profits. And even with that puny 14 per cent, drug companies squander a fortune developing "me-too" drugs – medicines that do exactly the same job as a drug that already exists, but has one molecule different, so they can take out a new patent, and receive another avalanche of profits.

As a result, the US Government Accountability Office says that far from being a font of innovation, the drug market has become "stagnant". They spend virtually nothing on the diseases that kill the most human beings, like malaria, because the victims are poor, so there's hardly any profit to be sucked out.

We all suffer as a result of this patent dysfunction. The European Union's competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, recently concluded that Europeans pay 40 per cent more for their medicines than they should because of this "rotten" system – money that could be saving many lives if it was redirected towards real health care.

Why would we keep this system, if it is so bad? The drug companies have spent more than $3bn on lobbyists and political "contributions" over the past decade in the US alone. They have paid politicians to make the system work in their interests. If you doubt how deeply this influence goes, listen to a Republican congressman, Walter Burton, who admitted of the last big health care legislation passed in the US in 2003: "The pharmaceutical lobbyists wrote the bill."

There is a far better way to develop medicines, if only we will take it. It was first proposed by Joseph Stiglitz, the recent Nobel Prize winner for economics. He says: "Research needs money, but the current system results in limited funds being spent in the wrong way."

Stiglitz's plan is simple. The governments of the Western world should establish a multi-billion dollar prize fund that will give payments to scientists who develop cures or vaccines for diseases. The highest prizes would go to cures for diseases that kill millions of people, like malaria. Once the pay-out is made, the rights to use the treatment will be in the public domain. Anybody, anywhere in the world, could manufacture the drug and use it to save lives.

The financial incentive in this system for scientists remains exactly the same – but all humanity reaps the benefits, not a tiny private monopoly and those lucky few who can afford to pay their bloated prices. The irrationalities of the current system – spending a fortune on me-too drugs, and preventing sick people from making the medicines that would save them – would end.

It isn't cheap – it would cost 0.6 per cent of GDP – but in the medium-term it would save us all a fortune because our health care systems would no longer have to pay huge premiums to drug companies. Meanwhile, the cost of medicine would come crashing down for the poor – and tens of millions would be able to afford it for the first time.

Yet moves to change the current system are blocked by the drug companies and their armies of lobbyists. That's why the way we regulate the production of medicines across the world is still designed to serve the interests of the shareholders of the drug companies – not the health of humanity.

The idea of ring-fencing life-saving medical knowledge so a few people can profit from it is one of the great grotesqueries of our age. We have to tear down this sick system – so the sick can live. Only then we can globalise the spirit of Jonas Salk, the great scientist who invented the polio vaccine, but refused to patent it, saying simply: "It would be like patenting the sun."

 

[Mr. Jollypants]

There was also a BIG court case because companies were wanting to COPYRIGHT DNA and Genes. COPYRIGHT IT. That way they could make money of it.

Luckily, the Supreme Court ruled against it.

 

[RonJ]

It's not a conspiracy, it's truth. When do you know of a corporation that makes billions of dollars, and just closes it's doors because it's product isn't needed anymore. They do whatever it takes to make sure their product is needed.

Breast Cancer is a good one to take since it's the most common. One in four cancers. National Cancer Institutes budget only does 5% for Breast Cancer. More than one in four cancers diagnosed this year will be Breast Cancer. So more than 25% of all cancers diagnosed this year will be breast cancer, but yet it only gets 5% of a companys budget.

Did you know that National Breast Cancer Awareness Month was created by a drug company (currently known as Astra Zeneca), who not coincidentally produces breast cancer treatment drugs? The whole Breast Cancer Awareness industry is a HUGE ONE.

Pharmaceutical companies clearly make huge profits, and money can corrupt. But the vast majority who work in the field have a genuine interest in finding answers and treatments. Your extremist voice of conspiracy does more harm than good.

 

[RonJ]

There was also a BIG court case because companies were wanting to COPYRIGHT DNA and Genes. COPYRIGHT IT. That way they could make money of it.

Luckily, the Supreme Court ruled against it.

I am in full support of the Court's decision.

 

[Mr. Jollypants]

Pharmaceutical companies clearly make huge profits, and money can corrupt. But the vast majority who work in the field have a genuine interest in finding answers and treatments. Your extremist voice of conspiracy does more harm than good.

The people who work do. The people who run them don't.

My extremeist voice doesn't do hard, it does good. If other people would understand that these corporations aren't actively (Sure, they do some work on it) looking for a cure, there would be outrage, these corporations are more for PREVENTION, then CURE.

I am in full support of the Court's decision.

I am too, if it would've gone through and the court rules for it, we'd be screwed.

 

[Hecz]

i don't know what to say.

 

[Hecz]

these corporations are more for PREVENTION, then CURE.

whatever the intentions of the corporations are will never stop humanity from moving foward with research and development.

 

[RonJ]

The people who work do. The people who run them don't.

I agree, but they wear different hats. CEOs are businessmen who MUST make big profits or be fired. That's just how business works. The scientists, however, work tirelessly for both cures and preventative measures. Neither the CEO nor scientist alone can solve the task alone, so they must work together, sometimes in apparent conflict. Such is life.

My extremeist voice doesn't do hard, it does good. If other people would understand that these corporations aren't actively (Sure, they do some work on it) looking for a cure, there would be outrage, these corporations are more for PREVENTION, then CURE.

Yes, questioning authority is definitely important. But don't cut off your nose to spite your face. Actually, cure has been the main focus for some time and prevention is just getting some attention, and rightly so.

 

[Mr. Jollypants]

I agree, but they wear different hats. CEOs are businessmen who MUST make big profits or be fired. That's just how business works. The scientists, however, work tirelessly for both cures and preventative measures. Neither the CEO nor scientist alone can solve the task alone, so they must work together, sometimes in apparent conflict. Such is life.

The scientists work on what they are told to work on. This isn't an industry where you can go off and do your own thing. The CEOs focus is prevention, thus, this is what 98% of the scientists do.

Yes, questioning authority is definitely important. But don't cut off your nose to spite your face. Actually, cure has been the main focus for some time and prevention is just getting some attention, and rightly so.

Cure hasn't been the main focus. If cure had been the main focus we wouldn't be working for prevention more than cure. Read the article I posted. It talks about how the corporations were suring poor countries because they were developing generic drugs that do the same thing that the big money drugs do, for less than 10% of the cost.

 

[RonJ]

The scientists work on what they are told to work on. This isn't an industry where you can go off and do your own thing. The CEOs focus is prevention, thus, this is what 98% of the scientists do.

This is completely wrong. The vast majority of scientists working on cancer cures and preventions are funded by the National Institutes of Health (U.S. government) and work on their own ideas. It's ridiculous to believe that business CEOs understand the science better than the scientists. The CEOs choose directions developed by scientists.


Cure hasn't been the main focus. If cure had been the main focus we wouldn't be working for prevention more than cure. Read the article I posted. It talks about how the corporations were suring poor countries because they were developing generic drugs that do the same thing that the big money drugs do, for less than 10% of the cost.

If the article says that prevention has been the main focus, then it is wrong. Since the Nixon administration, the emphasis of cancer research has been to understand the mechanisms by which cancer arises so that cures and treatments could be developed. This continues to be a major effort, but now prevention has become an added emphasis and with good justification.

 

[Mr. Jollypants]

I'm not going to reply, I hate when you reply in quotes.