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StaphAseptic™ News
Searching for Drugs
March 1, 2010
Commonweal
Posted by Peter Steinfels
The biggest story about health care this morning appears in the business pages, not the political section, of the New York Times. It is headlined "A Rising Hospital Threat: Infections Unfazed by Antibiotics Become More Common." A new category of bacteria is "already killing tens of thousands of hospital patients each year." These "Gram-negative" germs apparently beat out even the more widely known drug-resistant "methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus" - or MRSA for short - in their immunity to virtually every sort of treatment. And no relief is in sight, the article suggests, "for a combination of business reasons and scientific challenges."
To find out about the business reasons, you have to turn to a sidebar headed "Deadly Germs Largely Ignored by Drug Firms." Even there, you read through five paragraphs of medical information before getting to this: "The difficulty of killing Gram-negative germs is not the only reason for the dearth of new drugs. Another is that many big drug companies have scaled back or abandoned antibiotic development. Antibiotics are typically taken for a only a week or two, after which the patient is cured. They are simply not as lucrative as drugs for other diseases that are taken for a long time to manage a long-term condition."
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