Sunday, June 24, 2007

While Big Pharma make doggie antidepressants.....

Back story here.

A new, untreatable form of tuberculosis is striking up to 30,000 people a year, the World Health Organisation said on Friday, and warned it could spark an "apocalyptic scenario" if unchecked.

The United Nations agency appealed for $2.15 billion to combat drug-resistant TB under a programme which it said could save up to 134,000 lives over two years.

Extensively drug resistant TB (XDR-TB), a form virtually immune to antibiotics, has been reported in 37 countries in all regions since emerging in 2006, according to the WHO.

"There is somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000, we roughly estimate, cases of extensive drug resistant TB each year," Paul Nunn, coordinator of WHO's Stop TB Department, told a briefing.

"Ultimately, to face down this epidemic, we need new tools -- we need new drugs, we need new diagnostics," he added.

More

Insider repeats his call to Big Pharma. Why dont you stop inventing another "me too" antihpertensive/ statin/ anxiolytic/ hypnotic and get on with a real challenge..... or isn't the "market" big enough - yet?

More on the pet market.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Oh, the market is big enough all right. It just isn't rich enough. At the moment, it's mainly the Third World poor who die from TB? Why should Big Pharma care about THEM?