Roche makes one of the two drugs that can treat this outbreak, and you're talking smack about them? That's tasteless.
Oseltamivir is not available OTC. People that want it need permission from their doctors to get it, at least in the US. In Mexico, emergency procedures are being taken, and its distribution is being handled appropriately.
And your outcry strikes me as Dr.Evil from Austin Powers: "I demand... onemilliondollars!"
The US spends around 650 billion USD on military toys, every year.
Using 0.03% of that for pandemic research doesn't seem unreasonable.
In fact I find that annoyingly low when you consider that we're talking about one of the few risk factors that could literally wipe us out as a species within a blink.
You know the old joke where two planets meet?
One asks: "Hey, how are you doing?"
The other responds: "Ah not so good, I have homo sapiens."
The first: "Ah no worries, you'll be better soon. They never last longer than a few thousand years."
I dare you to find me an example of someone so shamelessly, transparently looking to profit off of the hypothetical suffering of others.
EDIT: OK, I guess it wasn't clear why I find this hysterical. I'll explain how I see it. (As background, my job previous to starting Dawdle was as the junior member of the investment team at Ascension Health Ventures, a health care VC fund. I know a little something about how this all works in this space. Also, it's Saturday night and I'm sick at home but nonetheless tipsy.)
To me, a fund dedicated to pandemics is an example of thematic investing gone to its extremes. Pandemics are a such a minor subset of the incredibly large and complex health care system that it strikes me as implausible that there are $200 million worth of worthy VC investments. I could be wrong, but that's my gut.
But what really strikes me as hysterical is that pandemics are hypothetical situations. Medical devices and new pharmaceuticals are generally about finding solutions to known - and existing - problems. The economic returns from investments in those things are well known and replicable.
Pandemics are totally different - the next pandemic could be any from a range of diseases with any sort of transmission protocol with who-knows-what root cause. To me, trying to find infrastructure investments for something that doesn't exist (cause Lord help you decide what the next pandemic is going to be) that takes rapid adoption by the moribund and dysfunctional health care industry is crazy.
KPCB strikes me as being perhaps the world's only venture firm that could get $200 million in commitments from LPs for such a crazy-ass thesis. To me, it's just a crazy-ass boondoggle to think this could possibly work. But, hey, I could be wrong.
Thanks for the downvotes, though. Those who did showed a total lack of appreciation for the English language. Y'all saw "hysterical" and read "terrible". Perhaps you'll do better next time.
[EDIT 2: If I were to invest in "pandemics", I'd try to take advantage of the certain hysteria among the public that would result. That, at least, is predictable. EDIT 3: http://www.fluidinfo.com/terry/2009/04/26/a-few-comments-on-... is worth the read.]
What the flying feeple is your problem? Should we all just roll over and die because no one invested in advanced medical tech that could save us?
Let me put this very clearly: Money is the basic unit which measures how much society cares about something. Money implements the power of professional specialization. Money is how real grownups get things done. http://lesswrong.com/lw/65/money_the_unit_of_caring/.
If no one is allowed to make money, that means society is not allowed to care. If scientists are not allowed to make money off suffering, it means that you are not allowed to hire scientists and pay them to work on the problem.
Agreed. I take ibuprofen when I've got a head ache or a pulled muscle, but Wyeth makes a major profit off of me when I buy advil. However I'd much rather pay my money, like anyone else on the planet, to not feel like crap.
I worked construction, I know how painful a ripped muscle is. With ibuprofen I can continue working, because it prevents the inflammation from being more painful than my actual injury. What would anyone rather pay, 3-4 days wages while your muscle gets back to strength naturally or 3-4 hours of wages while your muscle gets back to strength with an anti-inflammatory.
I believe it's my right to pay as little as possible for the same quality of medicines and such, however if I want to pay $100 (or whatever) for a vaccination for the H1N1 virus, which has a very low death rate, then that's my prerogative. I'd be buying a service, which is called 'Peace of Mind', and the person selling it expects payments.
People have recovered from cancers without the necessary medical treatments. However, everyone here would pay every penny they have to be cured of a cancer, why? Because rational humans don't count on miracles happening, we count on disasters happening.
They would be profiting by curing the suffering of others.
The only way they make money is if they make people better. And if they make people better, they deserve money. In fact, money is a damn good incentive to make sure we have anti-virals like this ready.
The cynic in me wants to agree with you, but the pollyanna optimist in me wants to think that such thematic investing isn't necessarily a bad thing.
I say this because I worked in academic bioinformatics research in 2002-2004. After the anthrax scares in 2001 a bunch of grant money was available under the auspices of "bioterrorism research." My PIs simply redid their grant proposals to change their general science research to bioterrorism research. Some interesting tech that is generally applicable came out of said research: biosensor chips, mapping, basic statistical clustering research, anonymization and medical record database research, etc.
Thus in theory the $200M could be used to fund important projects under the guise of "pandemic prevention" that could be generally useful. A few things that come to mind are gene sequencing speedups and advancements in molecular engineering (of vaccines).
I'm not saying this is really how things would pan out but it's perhaps the optimistic scenario. After all, the funding for the internet came around because the USA was panicked about the Soviets becoming technologically superior - ARPA arose because the Russians launched Sputnik.
At least it promises to be better than Transformers. That movie was like watching a large, HIV positive felon rape my childhood in the jailhouse shower.
I thought we were supposed to be afraid of Bird Flu, not Pig Flu. Can someone please make up their mind on what I'm supposed to panic about, I'm getting quite bored with all the changes.
If this actually becomes a big deal, it will be a massive economic problem - remember, it's not just the people who get sick who are the problem, but also the people who change their behavior/consumption based on risk mitigation. On the other hand, it would probably provide a boost to e-commerce spending, which would help people in our community.
I'm perfectly fine with this appearing on HN because I don't pay that much attention to regular media outlets anymore and I might actually pick up something relevant, useful or just interesting in the comments here.
It's not our problem that you don't want to read cnn.com or corriere.it or whatever every now and then. It is our problem when the home page gets filled up with "doom! gloom!" stories and various other things unrelated to Hacker News.
Possibly true. However there must have originally been some transfer from pigs to humans. Eating pigs and keeping them as livestock almost certainly contributed to the disease occurring. It is too late to stop this one but what about the next one. Anyone care to dispute the notion that the risk of these diseases 'crossing over' would be much reduced if humanity was vegetarian?
> Anyone care to dispute the notion that the risk of getting run over by a bus would be much reduced if you never left the house?
Anyone care to dispute the notion that vegetarians live healthier lives than meat eaters? Anyone care to provide an argument that eating meat is good for humanity either collectively or individually?
> Not to mention that livestock-spread diseases are just a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of horrible ways to die via epidemic.
If all of humanity was vegan, the risk would probably be greatly reduced, since no one would have any livestock. Vegetarian diets still include eggs and dairy.
But it's just a completely unhelpful comment. Humanity as a whole is not going to go vegetarian, let alone vegan. Proposing it as a solution is just pushing an agenda.
Partially agreed about the vegan part. I wasn't trying to get too technical. However disease transmission mostly seems to occur via eating meat rather than milk or eggs.
I do think it is entirely practical and possible that that most of humanity could go vegan some time in the future. Reducing the risk of disease is just one of many reasons why it would improve the world. If it is an economically superior solution then eventually that is the way the world is likely to head.
How's this for a more incrementally useful statement? Reductions in livestock and meat consumption would be likely to reduce the incidences of these type of diseases - therefore it is something we should look to minimise. It isn't an all or nothing proposition.
I got the impression that in this cases, the disease isn't spread through eating pigs. Rather, it's the fact that pigs and humans are living in close proximity to each other that allowed a flu strain to evolve that targeted both species. Hence my comment about livestock.
sadly, drinking soda, eating potato chips and candy = vegetarian too ... anyway that's not what i'm doing; neither do i eat eggs, milk, even fish. i should say go vegan!
i'm too selfish to care about what the rest of the world eat ... if you regard my post as a solution, fine, that's my solution to avoid *.flu -- for my selfish self
well, enough of myself
can you come up with better solution? something creative is even better, much better than critical things you said about how unhelpful/unfeasible one's solution is.
The calorie density of vegetarian food being what it is, it's probable that if all of humanity went vegetarian, it would solve the over-population problem pretty quickly too because we'd run out of food.
You have this completely wrong. It takes about 10 times the plant calories to produce meat calories. If the world stopped eating meat we would would be able to feed many more people.
The bigger issue with veganism (and to a lesser extent vegetarianism) is that it requires cleverness to avoid malnutrition. Like it or not, the human colon is too short for a generic vegan diet; we evolved to eat meat.
There are people who already have issues getting enough iron and protein. This problem would only be exacerbated by a pure vegetarian diet.
Furthermore, we do not have an issue producing food for people. We have an issue convincing people to produce food for people. That is, most of the people who starve do so because they cannot afford food, rather than because food is too expensive. This is not a problem of too little food production, because farmers can barely support themselves in places.
This is not to say that reducing meat consumption is not a bad thing, just that it would probably not solve all the worlds problems (or even the food-related ones).
> The bigger issue with veganism (and to a lesser extent vegetarianism) is that it requires cleverness to avoid malnutrition.
On balance I think it takes less cleverness to be a healthy vegetarian than it does than a healthy meat eater. I'm not a vegan so I can't comment in detail but if the misconceptions about vegetarianism are anything to go by I'd say the difficulties are pretty much all BS. And of course if society was vegan it would be trivial to find all the foods you needed regularly cause they'd be everywhere.
> Like it or not, the human colon is too short for a generic vegan diet; we evolved to eat meat.
The opposite argument actually works better. Could humans live on a 'generic' carnivore diet? It is just as easy to argue that we evolved to eat plants.
But if course that isn't how evolution works. We didn't 'evolve' to do anything but to further our genes. We didn't evolve to drive cars or use computers but here we are. Maybe we evolved to die early so there would be more food for our grandchildren. Evolution can be a rough guide but now we have science which favours a plant diet.
> There are people who already have issues getting enough iron and protein. This problem would only be exacerbated by a pure vegetarian diet.
People who are on the edge of starvation will benefit from any extra source of calories or nutrition. In the long term though the most efficient way to provide this would be via plants or perhaps even artificial means in some cases.
> Furthermore, we do not have an issue producing food for people.
Fair point. However the cheaper it is to produce food the more likely it will find it's way to the poorest of people.
It is pretty sad to see the knee jerk emotional response that many otherwise rational people have when it comes to the subject of impacts of meat eating. I guess you could call it another 'inconvenient truth'.
