I just found this news article today messy around with different news sites .
I think medical breakthrough are kinda strange now here why.
-lots of breakthrough with cloning has of late
-lots of breakthrough with tissue engineering
-lots of breakthrough with genetic engineering
-lots of breakthrough understating genes
-lots of breakthrough with stem cell
-lots of breakthrough with bioengineering
Finding new drugs to fight cancer , motor neuron disease , amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) ,MS, Parkinson’s so on is slow .But part that I think is two reason .
1.Using the top down approach
2.food and drug administration the ( FDA) that say they find a new drug in in the next day or two for problem x and looks good all the testings and clinical trials take about 10 to 15 years before it becomes main stream and out .
Using the button up approach would find the virus or molecule and try to build some thing to bind to it than using the top down approach trying to find things to bind to it . If they do this it be much faster.
May be faster computers may speed up of finding new drugs also.
How about we start with this quote from the article and call shenanigans on the rest based on that?
How about we add in how the stats displayed also show that a more significant number survivability has soared for several cancers? Particularly those where the most focus and money have been placed.
To a large degree the rise in cancer incidence is understood to be the result of us not dying earlier from other diseases, which means an increase in the total number of deaths is not “an utter failure”.
Cancer is not a single disease and each cancer type is complex. We don’t even know how many types there are as things we used to think was one particular type of cancer turns out to be made up of different types. So there’s no “the virus or molecule”. There are however “some viruses and some molecules” that have been discovered. Some of these discoveries have lead to breakthroughs, like the HPV-vaccine, some haven’t.
It is frankly not very clear what two approaches you are trying to distinguish here, but inasmuch as I can make any sense of the approach you are advocating, I am pretty sure that cancer researchers already do a lot of that.
I remember an article in Playboy, written after President Nixon announced the “War on Cancer”. Basically the author said something like “you cannot plot the attack on cancer, because you don’t know what it is”.I agree, much money was wasted in the beginning, because we lacked a basic understanding of how cancer operates. Now we do have a much better understanding, and so therapies are getting better and better. But anyone who thought that there would be a “magic bullet” for cancer was very wrong.
Look at the chart. It says that the mortality rate for cancer, if age-adjusted for the fact that the average age at death has been increasing, is going down. It peaked in about 1996. That article is from a Canadian newspaper and gives the rates for Canada. Here’s one from an American newspaper which says the same about the age-adjusted mortality rate in the U.S.:
There never really was a “war on cancer”, any more than there was a “war on infection” or “war on heart disease”.
You’d have difficulty convincing people with certain lymphomas or germ cell tumors (once near uniformly fatal, now highly curable), or with more common cancers like those of breast or prostate (curable or manageable for many years) that there’s been an “utter failure” of research and treatment.
The “utter failure” meme is common among alt med followers, notably those in the conspiracy wing who 1) are convinced there is a single simple mechanism for all cancers*, and that 2) the government and Big Pharma are suppressing the simple obvious cure (because no one in government or employed by drug companies ever gets cancer, doncha know).
*acid pH, insufficient oxygen in the body, Toxins, not enough vitamin D…wait, that’s a bunch of mechanisms right there.
Because using a question mark in a headline is a way of getting a story past editorial scrutiny when its thesis is unsupported by facts but a deadline is looming.
I wonder out of the US ,UK and Canada what country is doing better at keeping mortality rate low.
I don’t have chart with me but seen some cancer have survival rate of 60% and 70% and other a survival rate of 10%. I think it was prostate cancer or pancreatic cancer that has survival rate of 10% where breast cancer now is much better and 80% survival rate because of the media attention and alot of money put into past 10 years.
I think some brain cancers and lung cancers still have only 10% or 15% survival rate.
Much of the different cancers out there are very uneven some have good survival rate, some better ,other bad and than others really bad.
Some of the cancer that have bad and than others really bad survival rate you don’t really see adds on TV for donations ,public rallies ,charity groups , people calling or going door to door for donations and press report adds so on.
There’s lots of cancer research going on, but making drugs isn’t a “life-saving” exercise anymore, it’s a “monkey-making” opportunity. These clowns at the pharmaceutical companies will take Drug X that’s about to expire, add a single methyl group to one of the carbons, then remarket the Drug X as a Drug Y. These companies don’t care about making drugs, they care about making money. Thus, the Government, in my opinion, and met its research obligations, it’s the private sector who can’t translate that research into actual drugs and medicine. It’s just reason #402521 that the Government ought to be leading the charge with research and drug development. They could start by opening their own pharmaceutical company.
I doubt if there’s any major difference between the U.S., the U.K., and Canada in cancer mortality rates. Doctors in each of those countries have access to the same medical treatments. If there’s any difference, it’s that some people can afford extremely expensive treatments while others can’t. However, the number of cancer deaths prevented in patients who are affected by the availability or nonavailability of very expensive cancer treatments is actually not very large.
The reason that some types of cancer have much larger mortality rates than other types isn’t really because of the difference in the amount of research done on them. It’s because some cancers are simply much harder to fight with our present level of medical knowledge. To be able to cure some of the more stubborn forms of cancer, our knowledge of how the human body works is going to have to become vastly better.
You know, in Europe and Japan and so on they have universal health care. If the problem is the parasitical drug companies that are only interested in money, why haven’t they cured cancer in the UK or Germany or France?
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Disclaimer: All of the views expressed below are purely my own and should not in any way be taken as an official position of any organization I may be associated with.**
Its a little hard to parse what you are saying here. I assume English isn’t your first language. But I think you are generally on the right track. In the last decade or so there has been an explosion in our understanding of the molecular underpinnings of cancer, with the hope of developing drugs that specifically target certain oncogenic pathways. This has been possible with the aid of high speed computers, and other technical advances in the last fifteen years. Although each cancer is its own separate problem so there won’t be one “cure” for cancer, I anticipate that we are on the verge of a revolution in cancer treatment that will be akin to the invention of penicillin in treating infection.
Its really hard to compare cancer survival rates between countries, because definitions of disease can change from one country to the next. The classic exaple of this is prostate cancer which appears to have a much higher survival rate in the US than in Europe. This is because the US is much more aggressive in their cancer screens. Many prostate cancers are small and slow growing and never go on to pose any risk to the patient, and are generally not even treated. These would go unnoticed by the Europeans, but would be counted as cancer survivors in the US.
You are right. Pancreatic cancer is the killer, as I said above prostate can be very indolent (although this is not true of all prostate cancers). Breast cancer is an interesting case. As you have suggested breast cancer deaths have dropped significantly since the mid eighties, and is no longer the most common form of cancer death among women (lung cancer is), but it is still far and away the most funded cancer type. I think this is for two reasons. First is that research funding for breast cancer started out as bringing awareness to a woman’s disease in a largely patriarchal society, and so has been tied politically to woman’s rights. Second, as with prostate cancer with the new screenings many women are being discovered with early stage breast cancer, and so feel a personal interest the disease, regardless of its mortality.
I think there is validity in this position. There are no more Jonas Salks. Instead we have Big Pharma, which is intent on developing drugs that “treat” rather than cure illnesses. They can make more money on developing a drug that someone needs to take (and pay for, or have insurance pay for) for the rest of their lives, as opposed to a one-time vaccine. Would the polio vaccine have been developed (and given away) in today’s environment?
It’s not about universal health care, it’s about how much those countries invest in research. I’m pretty sure the NIH and the NSF have bigger research budgets than their counterparts in UK or Germany.
What you think nobody in “Big Pharma” has ever died or have a relative die of cancer and so is suppressing the cure that could save their loved one or themselves? It’s true that they are trying to make a buck and will use every weaselly way to extend their patents, but if one of them actually came up with a cure for a type of cancer I doubt they would suppress it. It would instantly become the treatment of choice and they would make a bundle. Further if they suppress it one of their competitors might bring it to market then they would be stuck with all of the disadvantages of no longer used treatment drugs, without the advantage of cornering the market on cures.
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Disclaimer: All of the views expressed above are purely my own and should not in any way be taken as an official position of any organization I may be associated with.**
I did not intend to smear the good work of countless scientists who are, in fact working on life-saving medicine. I was merely commenting that Dr. Salk was not motivated by profit.
