Mar 02 2009
The end of the common cold?
[Editor’s note: Even though I’m taking semi-holidays, through this week at least I’ll be alternating posts here and at my home blog, Left Cheek. So please read there every day you don’t find anything new here.]
The good news is that we could conceivably be done with the common cold. As well as dramatically reduce the onset of asthma attacks. Earlier this month, scientists found that they had “decoded the genomes of the ninety-nine common strains of the common cold,” according to The New York Times (you’ll probably need to register for this article).
The bad news is, it’s a practical impossibility at this stage for anybody to become financially interested in such a prospect. It now costs 700 million dollars to finance the development of a brand new drug. And since the cold is only looked at as largely just a ‘nuisance’, there’s close to no-chance that anybody would put up the type of dough it would take to buy a bottle, much less a mass rush to the pharmaceuticals to buy the products at $100 a pop. Do you think insurance companies would dole out for that?*
Just a nuisance? You tell that to teachers and parents of young children! Why do you think they have so many combined sick-days? That’s gotta be $700 million in lost productivity per year right there! Oy.
*Which is why, in my opinion, we need to clear out the insurance and re-prioritize the pharmaceuticals if we are going to have any real positive health care reform.
Hmmmm. I might disagree here with you, Chi-town dad.
I guess my concern would be that if they find a way to wipe out the cold bug, are we then inviting/creating a new, bigger, super bug to fill in its place?
Nature abhors a vacuum. Would be trading a pesky sniffle for something much much worse???
I agree that it truly sucks when a strain runs rampant, and perhaps I’m inclined to think this way because I have escaped most of the the bugs running about this year (knock on wood).
But I also think our immune systems need some amount of tempering. If we don’t give our bodies the regular workout to beat up on small itty bitty bugs like the common cold, then what do we do when we’re nailed with something really nasty?
art,
that’s a great point. why treat the disease when treating the symptoms makes them AS profitable, if not more so?
oldwestmom,
that’s why we should all follow the lead of our little ones and eat dirt.
Bet they’d spend the $700 million if it cleared up wrinkles. How’s that for a sad reflection?
I don’t think, oldwestmom, that the cold is covering up for something heinous. We’ve discovered things like diabetes and Alzheimer’s largely because what used to kill us off (various fevers and smallpox and tuberculosis and dysentary and cholera and…) are almost all gone so people are living long enough to be developing other disorders. But it was usually the killing diseases that were covering up nuisances, not the other way around.
New stuff will come, of course, and may be nasty. That is nature, though. I loved that article on eating dirt because it explained my son’s, who chews/eats everything, unshakeable health.
yeah, i kind of feel bad that my daughter doesn’t eat pennies or dirt or anything like that. another friend told me that she eventually gave in to her son’s need to eat dirt by giving him a rock to eat all over the place.
i’m honestly a bit worried about the superbug myself too. maybe it’s something wired into the unconcious of most of the Western world, but it seems that there’s always an apocalyptic fear running around about one humanity-ending virus or another (remember the bird flu? or SARS? i had a nasty cough - in the rain - and this bus passenger was so convinced i had SARS that he made a fuss about it b/f he voluntarily got off the bus. probably got sick himself that night. oh, funny). but i think the superbug is as a result of an influenza virus, not a rhinovirus.
besides, much like with congress, my apocalyptic fear has to do with the sale of chimpanzees over interstate lines.