Targeted Therapies: for cancers
Posted by: adonis49 on: January 28, 2009
Targeted Therapies: for cancers (January 28, 2009)
It is projected that in the developed nations of Europe, Japan and the USA one out of 3 people will be over 65 years by 2050; currently, the ratio is one out of five. By the year 2020, one out of 3 people will be treated of at least one kind of cancer and the total number of sick people treated will double. It is also known that people over 65 are the heaviest consumers of all kinds of medicines and that health cost in the last year of an individual over 65 of age amounts to over all the combined health cost during his life.
Furthermore, the various sorts of targeted chemo treatments of cancers are exploding exponentially; currently, there are over 600 new generation chemo treatments under development. Anti-cancer pharmaceutical products are the most lucrative in the business; one injection cost over $1000 or about 100,000 per year per cancer patient.
In the long run, it is not as costly to cure cancer patients as statically exposed. Treatment costs will decline sharply with the combined efforts of politics and economical mass production. Most of the patients will be completely cured and will return to the market place to generate wealth and consume as normal people do. There have been many similar cases where estimated costs didn’t match reality. For example, replacing hips with prosthetics when the upper femoral bone is broken; it turned out that the patients returned to normal life as productive and consuming individuals. What is needed is that States recognize that the growing number of older people are very much functional and are ready to work and thus, a change in the culture of accepting older people in the work force with special skills needs to be nurtured and encouraged with incentives.
The United Nations should have started a mechanism for health care on a global scale. A quota of cancer treatments for each of the 190 recognized States should be negotiated and the fund should include pharmaceutical products as taxes in kinds generated by the pharmaceutical industries, simply because the are mainly funded by States people’s taxes to support research and development.
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