Re: Healthcare: ‘Valley of death’ newcomer to scientific research

[Guest guest]

I've heard it said several times recently by those in the know that

drug research

companies are not enthusiastically funding research on " cures " because

there isn't much money

in them, relative to the money generated by drugs that offer long term

treatment of symptoms.

Evidently, if you cure somebody, you lose them as a customer.

Its a similar situation to malaria where you have a very crippling,

major killer, but the funding isn't there for research because all the

people are poor and couldn't pay that much more than now for better

drugs to treat symptoms even if they were available.

This blatant commercialism is a subject of a lot of controversy in the

medical field.

I've read a lot of examples of situations that illustrate this. You

can Google and find them yourself but be forewarned that it will

probably ruin your afternoon thinking about it.

Its a very ugly situation and it illustrates the cruelty and lack of

humanity of the way we structure business. Its also behind a lot of US

policy in a very ugly way. (To cover it up we pretend to fund

relatively small amounts of research on AIDS and malaria)

On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 8:40 AM, tigerpaw2c <tigerpaw2c@...> wrote:

> NICK JACOBS | `Valley of death'

>

> By NICK JACOBS

> For The Tribune-Democrat

> stown,PA,USA

>

> http://www.tribune-democrat.com/business/local_story_334231101.html

>

> Sharon Begley wrote an article for Newsweek Magazine titled Where

> Are the Cures?

>