When Sickness is Good Business

This week the UK’s Chief Medical Officer (CMO) published her annual report. It presented a view on a looming threat to our health: the body’s inability to fight off new infectious diseases and its resistance to existing drugs. The CMO said this threat was as serious as global terrorism and climate change. Oh really, why is that then?
In an interview the British CMO said unless we take urgent action, and within the next 25 years or so, our societies were likely to revert to a pre-antibiotic era because over the last 30 years very few new antibiotics had been developed. Her report highlighted the fact that while diseases evolved and become resistant to existing drugs, there have been very few new antibiotics developed leaving us vulnerable to new infectious diseases.  

It is important therefore to preserve our current stock of antibiotics. This means taking steps to prevent infections including being more scrupulous around hygiene but in particular, prescribing fewer antibiotics and only when absolutely necessary. Lowering anti-biotic use is critical to slowing the evolution of resistance.
Well that’s a tough call, since nowadays we are demanding anti-biotics, even for the common cold. The chart below from research undertaken by the Centre for Diseases Dynamics, Economics & Policy puts Europe and North America in the frame. While USA is highlighted, France and Greece seem to be having a real tough time.
The British CMO went on to say that the pharmaceutical industry had to be ‘incentivised’ to invest in producing new anti-biotics. Oh?  Why? Because there’s no money in it for them otherwise.  
Once you have completed your course of anti-biotics your symptoms abate and you may not need medicating again until the following year, or another five years, or longer. It’s more profitable to produce drugs that become part of daily life.
Last year I watched as a friend refilled his weekly pillbox with approximately three or four tablets for each day of the week.  We keep the pharmaceutical industry in healthy profit with our unhealthy lifestyles and dependency on generic prescription drugs. Illness makes good business sense.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When a President Cried

Image
At a time of year when Christians around the world are commemorating the birth of the Divine Child, some parents in Newtown , Connecticut , USA are mourning the death of their children. There are probably hundreds of children around the world – in under developed countries, in conflict zones – who will die every day up to Christmas and beyond. But right now the focus has been on what one British newspaper described as a massacre of innocents. How horrendous to lose your child in such a manner. Schools should be one of the few places where you expect your children to be safe.   I worked with several of the paramedics who were first on the scene dealing with the carnage on the trains at various metro stations after the 2005 London bombings. Many, especially the younger ones, suffered severe post traumatic stress. Not trained for such horrors, those teachers immediately on the scene at that school in Connecticut will carry the scarring from that day for some time. How many more
Read more

The Economic Migrant and the Bag Lady

Image
Some years ago I was telling someone about my bag lady experience. She looked at me with astonishment and disbelief.  The Bag Lady Many years later this person, who had by then become a friend, also had her own bag lady experience. She had gone from place to place, not quite sleeping on a park bench but near enough, with only the barest essentials – a toothbrush and change of clothes in a bag – not enough to merit a supermarket trolley! The economic migrant and bag lady experience are etched into my DNA. I was born on the Caribbean island of Dominica nestled between Guadeloupe and Martinique , two French colonies. Dominica was itself fought over by the French and British for centuries. The French eventually lost. I could so easily have been a French citizen sitting in Paris writing this. In fact my mother's maiden name is the same as her family's French slaveowners of yester-year. A SNAPSHOT OF HISTORY: In 1635, France claimed Dominica along with all th
Read more

The Trickster as Teacher

Image
I received mail from a reader who was unable to post a message following my comment last week about ‘Myth as Metaphor’ (see The Fool Unmasked). He asked whether I knew any myths which were more relevant to his African culture. Well yes I do….but not a myth as such, more of a folktale. But all myths are relevant to every culture .   Archetypes are generally referred to as "the gods". It is generally claimed that Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and a founding father of depth psychology, brought knowledge of these innate patterns of human behaviour to the attention of Western psychology. Certainly all my training text books made the point.  Obatala - Father of Humankind Divinity of Light I guess he did do that but long before Jung, West African Orishas were known as multi-dimensional beings representing, not only the forces of nature but certain human attributes. Their characteristics and legend were similar to those used to describe the ancient Greek and Roman go
Read more