Antibiotics Research Subsidies Weighed by U.S.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/06/health/policy/06germ.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=U.S.%20considers%20subsidies%20to%20develop%20mew%20antibiotics&st=cse

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine <levinebar@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 7:11 PM
Subject: re: Antibiotics Research Subsidies Weighed by U.S.
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:

    The threat of pathogens resistant to all known antibiotics is a real and present danger to us all. The remedies proposed by congressman Gingrey and by David Brennan cannot suffice to stop it.  If the U.S. FDA were presented a miraculous new antibiotic today that worked against all known resistant pathogens, it would approve it only for last-line defense after other antibiotics had failed first. That's the responsible thing to do. Alas, that is such a small indication that the drug company could never make back the cost of R&D in the U.S. market at any credible price point even if you were to triple the length of patent exclusivity.  By then, sales outside the authority of the U.S. FDA would have long since driven the evolution of new organisms, resistant even to this new drug.  This is not a problem that our profit-driven drug industry can fix. If someone-government or private--doesn't step and and fund this work outright, we and our children will blunder into a dark new world in which a trivial infection--or mere childbirth--could prove fatal about twenty percent of the time, just as it did before the advent of "miracle drugs".

Barry Levine