Stalinist Health Care!

Having developed an allergic reaction to penicillin, I long have been aware that our medical treatments were limited and full of side effects. Now it seems we have stumbled back into a treatment that has existed alongside our antibiotic approach to treatment, that has a great deal of promise for actual treatment of patients with highly resistant infections. Why isn't out Big Pharma developing it like mad, since antibiotic resistant infection rates are skyrocketing?

Betcha already guessed part of it. It doesn't present the prospect for profits of the antibiotics. It has to be developed for each different variety of infection, so it is hard to mass-produce, and hard to patent. It has the great promise of not having a wide range of effects and lots of different bacteria-fighting elements all in the one dose. This is great for the patient. As stated, it doesn't make your Big Pharma its uber profit.

An old-fashioned treatment for bacterial infections which was once found in every Red Army soldier's kit bag is being touted as a new weapon against hospital superbug MRSA.
(snip)
The initial euphoria around the bacteriophage as a means of combating what had been incurable conditions subsided and the virus was all but forgotten.

But not in Stalin's Soviet Union, where a research programme was pioneered in his homeland of Georgia. Even today, the bacteriophage is used as standard treatment in parts of Eastern Europe for bacterial infections from gangrene to strep throat.

Meanwhile in the West, the love affair with antibiotics is drawing to a close.

Overuse means many bacteria have become resistant to many forms of the treatment, and the willingness of drug firms to bring new brands onto the market appears to be faltering. It can cost as much as £400m ($800m) to develop the drug and take as long as ten years.
(snip)
Phages are notoriously hard to patent, the process by which drug companies secure their future profits.

The promise of treatment for infections - that doesn't have all the problems of resistance - would normally be a great breakthrough, greeted by the healthcare providers with joy and optimism. If it weren't that those healthcare providers have lost the basic decency of their profession, they would be dancing in the streets. No more lost lives of patients by acquiring highly aggressive infections, some of them flesh-eating, would be great for anyone actually devoted to patient care.

If you see anyone who meets this description in your local pharmaceutical company, don't tell the boss. That would not promote their bottom line, and would count, in terminology "Sicko" discovered among insurance companies, as "medical loss". When your profits are diminished, if you're a healthcare provider without any care for patient well-being, that's loss. Your patient's survival costs you, flush him/her.

The Big Pharma interests may be threatened by the Stalinist bacteriophage! Can't wait to see the commercials about the latest Red Threat to sacred profits. Saving lives has just turned evil, and insidious, to the Big Pharma firms. Stay tuned.