I read an interesting article in Nature the other day, when I was working in the library. It was an editorial article warning that the free market has not delivered the new antibiotics we need, and won't do so in the future either without some sort of interference. The main reasons are:
* Antibiotics, like all new medicinal drugs, are expensive to develop.
* Antibiotics cure people: you take them for a while, then you stop, because you get well. This makes them a lot less lucrative than medicines against AIDS or chronic illnesses, because those medicines usually have to be taken for a long time or forever.
* Bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics. This means the product will have decreasing utility as time goes by. What's worse, since new antibiotics are so rare, medical professionals would have to be very careful in their use, and only use them as a last resort. That's not very profitable for the producers. To put it crudely, it may look as although bacterial evolution is no match for human ingenuity, it's more than enough to defeat human pharmaceutical markets :-(
There were two articles, one presenting the problem an another discussing possible solutions. I would like to link to them, but since you need an expensive Nature subscription to read them anyway, it's better to just look in the library.
A good read to remind people that unregulated markets don't solve all the world's problems.
Ah, I just thought of something. This article will get flooded my pharmaspam comments. Perhaps it would be better to write to me this time, if you want to comment.
Posted by vintermann at October 28, 2004 11:30 AM