The cost of drugs for a dead disease OR why we spent $410 million to help drug companies
The US government has taken delivery of the first drug said to cure smallpox. It was developed under a government plan to buy biodefence drugs that would otherwise stall in development for lack of a market. The country plans to buy enough to treat two million people, for $410 million.
On the face of it, that looks like a good plan. Yet as New Scientist reported this week, thousands of people are dying from antibiotic-resistant bacteria, for want of just such funding for new antibiotics. No one has died of smallpox since the disease was declared eradicated in 1980. So what's going on?
Developing a drug is expensive. It won't happen without either a lucrative market or public funding. After the US anthrax attacks of 2001, the country massively boosted public funding for biodefence.
In 2001, "smallpox virus as a biological weapon posed the most serious threat", says D.A. Henderson of the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who helped lead smallpox eradication. The fate of tonnes of weaponised smallpox that was stockpiled by the Soviet Union was unknown. And as vaccination had stopped, many people were not immune to the fast-spreading and deadly virus that kills a third of its victims.
There was little smallpox vaccine left, and companies could not make more, because with the disease gone, no one would want to buy a drug to combat it. So the US government gave a total of more than a billion dollars to various companies for them to make a stockpile of 220 million doses of new vaccine.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23278-threatwatch-the-cost-of-drugs-for-a-dead-disease.html?cmpid=RSS|NSNS|2012-GLOBAL|online-news