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Bad Assumption

Hi, Mr. Peabody.

You said:

The Phamacutical companies have just that point of view... keep them sick but alive for the pure purpose of profit.

Sick isn't it?

You're making a pretty bad assumption here: You assume that illnesses are finite.

Let's suppose for the moment that pharmaceutical companies come up with a vaccine that prevents HIV infection. By your logic, once the pharmaceutical companies vaccinated all the people there were to vaccinate, there would be no more money to be made. We know from the flu vaccine that that is false. You don't (and can't) wipe communicable diseases off the face of the earth, because mutation happens. Such diseases are living organisms, which will always develop immunities.

Mutation also guarantees that cancers will always occur. There's no such thing as running out of people to give cancer drugs to, because cancer will always show up.

In other words, diseases aren't finite, so developing a drug for a disease doesn't mean you'll run out of patients once you've "cured" everyone who has it now.

You have actually slipped into a tempting fallacy: The idea is that the human body is perfect on its own, as long as you don't do anything bad to it. That's just not so. Even if we could somehow genetically engineer a human being with no genetic predispositions to disease, and a perfect immune system, genetic mutation would still happen over time, and result in disease.

Finally, keep this in mind: Pharmaceutical companies would make boatloads of money if they could detect and eliminate diseases immediately (i.e., before people felt "sick"). Do you have any idea how much money a company could make if they, for example, developed an over-the-counter cure for cancer? Look at the market for OTC obesity drugs. (Certainly a large market.) It would be several orders of magnitude larger than that.

Posted by: bhartman36   Posted on: 12/28/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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