Extropia Responds: Why Is There No Cure For the Common Cold?

in #opinion5 years ago

EXTROPIA RESPONDS

Welcome to an occasional series in which I respond to a question somebody has asked on the Internet. This time, the question was...

‘Why Haven’t We Cured The Common Cold Yet?

My response: I once read about a DARPA program that tackled infectious disease. It was known as the Unconventional Pathogen Countermeasures and it was headed by one John Carney.

The research lead to something called ‘genomic glue’. This ‘genomic glue’ stuck so tightly into the genome of the pathogen that it could not be read, translated and replicated. According to Joel Garreau who wrote about this research in his book ‘Radical Evolution’, “the bugs have not been able to develop resistance to the treatment no matter how hard the researchers have tried to induce it”. And Carney himself commented on how widespread a countermeasure this was: “Despite the fact you are in the middle of nowhere and you have no way of getting medical help to diagnose what you’ve got, the drug will work. It’s not going to cure Alzheimer’s disease are arthritis. But anything that came from the living world that can cause disease in you”.

In other words, any and all pathogens be it plague, the flu and, yes, even the common cold.

So what happened to this cure for all pathogens? One possibility is that we underestimated pathogen’s ability to evolve ways around our attacks and they somehow found a weakness in genomic glue that the scientists trying to make it fail did not consider.

But I think we should entertain another possibility.

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(Image from wikimedia commons)

I think many people are mistaken when they assign primary motivation fo businesses. For example, if asked ‘why do pharmaceutical companies exist’ most people would answer “to research and sell cures for conditions that negatively affect our lives”.

This is wrong. In actual fact, such companies’ primary motivation is to maximise their profits.

Now let’s imagine this genomic glue really works and it goes on sale. Since this intervention stops pathogens from replicating, it stands to reason that eventually the last person to be infected will take the drug, and then pathogens will have gone extinct. Thereafter, no more money can be earned from selling the cure because there is nothing to be cured anymore.

Sure, you would profit for as long as somebody was infected but it would be better, from a perpetual profit seeking point of view, to continue selling your products. So, what you do is, you never allow the public access to something like ‘genomic glue’. No, you just provide treatments that alleviate the symptoms of pathogens but do not eradicate them. That way, you can continue to profit from their existence and make more money than you would earn from wiping them out altogether.

If this sounds uncomfortably close to conspiracy theory talk, one can find examples of the medical industry seeming to work more in favour of producing costs than societal benefits. Consider, for example, a curious feature of the modern market system; that being the way that the number of salaried paper-pushers seems to grow while those who do genuinely productive work in the real economy are ruthlessly squeezed and cut. Consider the private health industry for example, a sector where one finds an extraordinary amount of bureaucracy. Dylan Ratigan described a typical procedure thus:

"Before Larry underwent surgery, he was charged a copayment...His doctor dictated the details of the care that Larry had received. Then a paid coder translated the typed description into medical shorthand notes. Then a paid medical biller wrote up the codes as a bill that was sent to the insurance company. Then an insurance adjuster reviewed the bill and authorised full or partial payment".

Something like 20 to 30 percent of the money spent on healthcare goes to paperwork bureaucracy, and obviously the more complex that bureaucracy becomes the easier it is for parasites to intertwine themselves with legitimate middle-management and extract wealth while posing as a vital and necessary part of the system.

Another example of how the commodification of everything results in the corruption of the market for healthcare can be seen in the area of 'market exclusivity'. Consider the hormonal agent hydroxyprogesterone, which is taken by pregnant women at risk of premature birth. It used to cost $15 per injection and since 15 to 20 injections are necessary the overall cost of this treatment was $300. But no longer. In 2011, the FDA granted the company KV Pharmaceutical the exclusive rights to sell the hormone, and that company duly gave it the brand name Makena and pushed the price up to $1,500 per injection. So now the cost of the overall treatment runs to $25,000. Bare in mind that absolutely nothing was done to improve the treatment; the company just took advantage of its monopoly rights and extracted unearned wealth from patients and taxpayers alike.

Given practices like this, I submit that it is within the realms of possibility that even if a cure for the common cold did exist, it might not be as profitable to make it available compared to merely alleviating symptoms.

REFERENCES

“Greedy Bastards” by Dylan Ratigan

“Radical Evolution” by Joel Garreau

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"Cold" is a message your body is sending to you because you eat too much, because you are too tired. It is a chance to get a cold, it is an occasion to adapt your behaviour. (from Itsuo Tsuda)
You can enhance your immunity system to fight cold with natural product like propolis.
Propolis and the immune system: a review.

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