That it takes American private industry to find what could be the precursor to a cure for AIDS
Results from a highly anticipated clinical study show that an experimental drug suppressed the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) to undetectable levels in people with highly drug-resistant forms of the pathogen. The drug, TMC125 (etravirine), is the first of its kind in nearly a decade and is one of three new drugs capable of treating drug-resistant HIV that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is expected to approve this year.
The new drugs offer the hope of treatment to perhaps thousands of HIV patients who have stopped responding to other medications, says William Towner, medical director of the Kaiser Permanente HIV/AIDS research trials program and member of the study team, which reported its findings online today in The Lancet. By keeping the virus at undetectable levels, researchers believe they can slow the spread of drug-resistant varieties.
Lee at Right Thinking correctly points out that this drug was not discovered in Cuba, or France, or Canada, or the UK, or any of the other places where the government is the provider of citizen healthcare and the funding mechanism for 90+% of the medical research.Â
Of course, proponents of government run healthcare would bleat that if we would just take enough tax money from “The Rich” and give it out to whom the fed has decided is most deserving (aka: those who can woo their Congressmen the best), that those recipients would eventually discover a medicine this good.
Eventually.