The Real Cancer Killer: rip-off prices for drugs set by ‘profiteering’ Big Pharma Giants

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Doctors say industry 'profiteering' threatens lives.

An influential group of cancer experts has warned that the high prices charged by pharmaceutical companies for cancer drugs are effectively condemning patients to death.

The group of more than 100 leading cancer physicians from around the world, including nine from the UK, accuse the drug industry of “profiteering” – making a profit by unethical methods such as by raising the cost of grain after a natural disaster.

Of the 12 drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the US in 2012, 11 were priced above $100,000 (£65,000) per patient per year. In addition the price of existing drugs of proven effectiveness has been increased by up to threefold.

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The specialists say: “What determines a morally justifiable ‘just price’ for a cancer drug? A reasonable drug price  should maintain healthy pharmaceutical industry profits without being viewed as ‘profiteering’. This term [profiteering] may apply to the trend of high drug prices where a life threatening medical condition is the disaster.”

The high prices mean the drugs may not be approved by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence in the UK forcing doctors to fill in a 14 page application apply to the Cancer Drugs fund for British patients who could benefit from them.

In addition, the rising cost of existing drugs in a cash limited health service such as the NHS means treatment is denied to other patients with other conditions.

The authors of the article, published in the journalBlood, are all specialists in blood cancers such as leukaemia, where cancer drugs have proved most effective.

One of the best known – imatinib, whose brand name is Glivec – has proved so successful in chronic myeloid leukaemia that patients who a decade ago survived for a few years can now look forward to a near-normal life expectancy.

But the cost of Glivec has risen from £18,000 per patient per year to around £21,000 in the UK, and from $30,000 to $92,000 in the US. This is despite the fact that all research costs were covered by the original price, and the number of patients treated and the length of time they are on the drug have both vastly increased because of the drug’s success.

Daniel Vasella, former chairman and chief executive of Novartis, the manufacturer, said the original price charged for Glivec in 2001 was considered “high but worthwhile” and was estimated to yield annual revenues of $900 million, enough to cover its development cost in two years. A decade later Its annual revenues in 2012 were $4.7 billion (£3 billion).

The cancer specialists say the revenue earned by Glivec over the last ten years “represent generous profits to the company”. But this has put heavy pressure on those who have to foot the bill. “Grateful patients may have become the financial victims of the treatment success, having to pay the high price annually to stay alive”.

In the US even those with health insurance may pay an average of 20 per cent of drug prices out of pocket. Drug prices are the single most frequent cause of personal bankruptcies in the US.

Three new drugs have been approved for chronic myeloid leukaemia in the last year by the FDA but the prices are “astronomical” the authors say at up to $138,000 a year per patient.

Worldwide only about a quarter of the patients with chronic myeloid leukaemia who could benefit have access to drugs because of the cost. “A small fraction are rich enough to pay individually, and most are treated intermittently or not at all. The effects of these financial pressures on long term survival… are yet unknown.”

In the UK, patients are shielded from the “direct economic anxieties of illness”, the article says.  But Professor Jane Apperley, chair of the Department of Haematology at Imperial College, London, and one of the authors, said high drug prices were still a cause of harm in Britain .

“The price of a drug heavily influences the decision of NICE whether we can prescribe it on the NHS. I am chief of service at Imperial College and we are constantly being asked to reduce our spending. We have to look very carefully at the cost of the drugs we use.”

“Of course we need the pharmaceutical industry to go on developing new drugs. It is very exciting that a number of cancers are now becoming susceptible to these new drugs. But the rising cost is unsustainable. “

“The drugs are very effective at keeping people alive. But if they are priced out of what you can afford you know that you can keep people alive but you can’t afford to do so. It is completely unsustainable for the NHS because the costs are going up every year. We need a serious dialogue about whether we can sustain these costs.”

The authors of the article in Blood conclude: “We believe the unsustainable drug prices may be causing harm to patients. Advocating for lower drug prices is a necessity to save the lives of patients who cannot afford them. We believe drug prices should reflect objective measures of benefit, but should not exceed values that harm our patients and societies.”

The group say they intend to organise regular meetings and campaign for lower cancer drug prices.

A spokesperson for the UK charity Beating Blood Cancers said: “As a charity we want to see an ethical approach to drug pricing . There is no point in us investing in research if the pricing policy means drugs won’t be available to patients.”

In a statement to The Independent, Novartis said: “We recognize that sustainability of health care systems is a complex topic and we welcome the opportunity to be part of the dialogue.  Our critical role, as one of many parties working towards improving cancer care, is to discover and develop innovative treatments.”

“ Novartis innovation in chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) has changed the course of the disease. Before Glivec(imatinib)* and Tasigna (nilotinib), the five-year survival in CML was only 30 percent. Today, nine out of ten patients with CML have a normal lifespan and are leading productive lives.”

“Over the years, our programs have evolved to improve patient access to our medicines. We work together with government health care systems, charities and other payers to build successful cost-sharing models.”

Expert view: ‘Price of drugs is harming patients’

The following is an extract from an article, contributed to by more than 100 leading cancer physicians from around the world, including nine from the UK, published in the journal, Blood.

This perspective reflects the views of a large group of CML experts, who believe the current [high] prices of drugs may compromise access of needy patients to highly effective therapy, and are harmful to the sustainability of our national healthcare systems...

If drug price reflects value, then it should be proportional to the benefit to patients in objective measures, such as survival prolongation, degree of tumour shrinkage, or improved quality of life. For many tumours, drug prices do not reflect these endpoints, since most anti-cancer drugs provide minor survival benefits, if at all.

As physicians, we… believe the unsustainable drug prices in CML and cancer may be causing harm to patients. Advocating for lower drug prices is a necessity to save the lives of patients who cannot afford them … For CML, and for other cancers, we believe drug prices should reflect objective measures of benefit, but should also not exceed values that harm our patients and societies.”

An ethical price tag? Cancer drugs

Brands used for the treatment of chronic myeloid leukaemia

Imatinib (Glivec) £21,000 per patient per year - Novartis
Designed from first principles, it proved hugely effective and unexpectedly turned into a blockbuster, earning billions of pounds for its makers.

Nilotinib (Tasigna) £21,000 - Novartis
Designed for patients who fail to respond to Glivec, Novartis reduced the cost to get it past Nice, whilst increasing the cost of Glivec.

Dasatinib (Sprycel) £31,000 - Bristol Myers Squibb
Also designed for patients who cannot take Glivec. But it has not been approved by Nice for use on the NHS because of its high cost.

Bosutinib (Bosulif) £76,000 - Pfizer
For patients who suffer side-effects from the other drugs. It won approval in the US in 2012 but is awaiting a licence in the UK.

Omacetaxine (Synribo) £100,000 - Teva
For patients who cannot tolerate other drugs. Approved in US in 2012 but awaiting licence in the UK.

Ponatinib (Iclusig) £90,000 - Ariad
A third-generation drug which works in a different way. Approved in the US in 2012 but awaiting a licence in the UK.

Source:

www.independent.co.uk

http://worldtruth.tv

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The REAL Source of Cavities and Gum Disease

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Our modern stereotype is that – until recently – people were plagued with rotting teeth, cavities and gum disease.

But the truth is that prehistoric people had much better oral health than we do today.

As NPR reports:

Prehistoric humans didn’t have toothbrushes. They didn’t have floss or toothpaste, and they certainly didn’t have Listerine. Yet somehow, their mouths were a lot healthier than ours are today.

“Hunter-gatherers had really good teeth,” says Alan Cooper, director of the Australian Center for Ancient DNA. “[But] as soon as you get to farming populations, you see this massive change. Huge amounts of gum disease. And cavities start cropping up.”

And thousands of years later, we’re still waging, and often losing, our war against oral disease.

Our changing diets are largely to blame.

In a study published in the latest Nature Genetics, Cooper and his research team looked at calcified plaque on ancient teeth from 34 prehistoric human skeletons. What they found was that as our diets changed over time — shifting from meat, vegetables and nuts to carbohydrates and sugar — so too did the composition of bacteria in our mouths.

However, the researchers found that as prehistoric humans transitioned from hunting and gathering to farming, certain types of disease-causing bacteria that were particularly efficient at using carbohydrates started to win out over other types of “friendly” bacteria in human mouths. The addition of processed flour and sugar during the Industrial Revolution only made matters worse.

“What you’ve really created is an ecosystem which is very low in diversity and full of opportunistic pathogens that have jumped in to utilize the resources which are now free,” Cooper says.

And that’s a problem, because the dominance of harmful bacteria means that our mouths are basically in a constant state of disease.

“You’re walking around with a permanent immune response, which is not a good thing,” says Cooper. “It causes problems all over the place.”

According to Cooper, bacteria make up approximately 90 percent of the cells in our bodies. He believes that we focus too much on ourselves and not enough on this so-called microbiome.

“We brush our teeth and we floss, and we think that we’ve got good oral hygiene. But [we're] completely failing to deal with the underlying problem,” he says. “Ten years from now, I think we’re going to find that the whole microbiome is a key part of what you get monitored for and treated for.“

While this seems counter-intuitive at first, it makes sense after a little reflection. After all, we evolved as hunters and gatherers. We haven’t had time to adapt – in an evolutionary times frame – to a life of farming … let alone processed foods.

No wonder – according to the New York Times:

More than 75% of American adults have some form of gum disease.

The science of healthy internal bugs is in its infancy. As Live Science notes:

“The concept of a probiotic to help reestablish our baseline microbiota after an antibiotic is a good concept,” [microbiologist Martin Blaser of the NYU School of Medicine] told LiveScience. “But the idea that, of all thousand species in our bodies, taking a single species that comes from cow or cheese is naïve.” Current probiotics are very well marketed, Blaser said, but there’s not much benefit. He does think medicine will one day develop probiotics that will be used to treat illness, but as of now, “it’s a very young field,” he said.

Ingesting too many antibiotics has also been linked to obesity, as it kills – often permanently – helpful intestinal bacteria and hypertension. Probiotics – which replace healthy intestinal bacteria – can promote weight loss, at least in people who don’t have a thriving community of natural intestinal flora.

Indeed, a healthy microbiome is also important for mental health:

Live Science reports:

Researchers have increasingly begun to suspect the gut was somehow linked with the brain. For instance, bowel disorders seem linked with stress-related psychiatric disorders such as anxiety and depression in people.

To learn more, scientists experimented with mice by feeding them a broth containing Lactobacillus rhamnosus JB-1. This species naturally lives in our gut, and scientists are exploring whether strains of it can be used as “probiotics” to improve our health. They discovered these rodents displayed significantly less behavior linked with stress, anxiety and depression than mice fed plain broth. Bacteria-fed mice also had significantly lower levels of the stress hormone corticosterone in response to stressful situations such as mazes.

“By affecting gut bacteria, you can have very robust and quite broad-spectrum effects on brain chemistry and behavior,” researcher John Cryan, a neuroscientist at University College Cork in Ireland, told LiveScience.

“Without overstating things, this does open up the concept that we could develop therapies that can treat psychiatric disorders by targeting the gut,” Cryan added. “You could take a yogurt with a probiotic in it instead of an antidepressant.”

The investigators found that one GABA receptor component was present in higher levels in bacteria-fed mice in parts of the brain where it is normally lowered during depression. In addition, several GABA receptor components were reduced in parts of the brain where they are normally increased in stressed or anxious animals.

Next, the researchers severed the vagus nerve, which helps alert the central nervous system to changes in the gastrointestinal tract. They found the bacteria-induced effects on behavior and GABA receptors were diminished, suggesting this nerve is the pathway by which changes in the gut can influence the brain.

Vagal nerve stimulations have been used at times to treat depression resistant to other therapies, but “that’s a surgical technique,” Cryan said. “By targeting the gut with probiotics, we could indirectly target the vagus nerve without surgery.”

And see this.

Many native cultures ate a lot of fermented foods containing healthy bacteria. Think yogurt, miso and Inuit fermented seal blubber (gross, we know …)

Given that the modern diet contains less fermented foods, and that antibiotics have killed off some of our healthy intestinal flora, probiotics – sold in health food stores – are an important preventative measure against depression.

So it should come as no surprise that probiotics can help our oral health, as shown by scientific studies published in the American Journal of Dentistry, European Journal of Dentistry, and elsewhere.

In a couple of years, we will be able to get the right probiotics to kill the bad bugs in our mouth without destroying the good guys like antibiotics do.

In the meantime, good oral hygiene – conscientious tooth brushing and flossing – is important. Indeed, an overwhelming number of scientific studies conclude that cavity levels are falling worldwide … even in countries which don’t fluoridate water.

World Health Organization Data (2004) -
Tooth Decay Trends (12 year olds) in Fluoridated vs. Unfluoridated Countries:

This is due to increased education about the importance of oral hygiene.

In addition, we should cut out refined flour and refined sugar. As Live Science notes:

Cooper suggests that one way to help return your microbiome to a healthier, more balanced state might be to cut out all of those processed carbs and start eating like our ancestors.

Cranberry juice contains a chemical that blocks cavity-causing bacteria from sticking to teeth. Drinking some unsweetened cranberry juice during the day can reduce cavities.

Finally, brushing with baking soda (or a toothpaste containing baking soda) is safe, and helps to reduce plaque … even in hard-to-reach areas.

Source:

www.globalresearch.ca

http://worldtruth.tv

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