THE COST OF HEALTH (2)

"Last month, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated $19 million to the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative to further one of its goals: finding a new drug for African sleeping sickness. Not that $19 million will come close to doing that. Even if a miracle cure is found, it will take lab work and clinical trials that could easily cost $100 million to prove it is really a miracle and not the Vioxx of the African savannah. But the gift spotlights just how tricky the search for new treatments can be when the disease is fearsome but nearly forgotten because its victims are poor and obscure. ...“Sleeping sickness” is too benign a nickname for human African trypanosomiasis, which is caused by a protozoan spread by biting tsetse flies. When the parasites enter the brain, victims hallucinate wildly. They have been known to chase neighbours with machetes, throw themselves into latrines and scream with pain at the touch of water. Only at the end do they lapse into a lassitude so great that they cannot eat, followed by coma and death. About 150,000 people contract the disease each year, but 50 million people in 36 countries live in areas where they are at risk." (New York Times, 8 January)
How typical of capitalism, we have an awful disease but it is not lucrative enough to provide a cure and anyway the victims are all poor! RD