GLOOM

No baby?  No problem

Linda and unknown puppy.  1978

I am escaping the cleaning lady, hiding in my office, reading the Bellingham Herald, and feeling depressed.  Normally I finish the Herald in about three minutes, but this morning it featured an article on AFM, enteroviruses, and the FDA that nailed my attention.  Here it is:

   http://www.bellinghamherald.com/news/local/article112430207.html

(One should note that it originated in the Washington Post.)

First, some vocabulary:

AFM: Acute Flaccid Myelitus.  This is a nasty disease that seems to have flared up recently.  It affects children; 89 so far in the U.S.  It leaves one or more limbs paralyzed, and has other effects.  A little Bellingham boy recently died from it.

Enterovirus.  An RNA virus that usually hangs out in the gut.  One kind of enterovirus causes polio.

RNA.  Aw, you know what that is.

Compassionate-use exception.  Say you are dying, and out there in the Pharma universe there exists a drug that night help.  The problem, however, is that it is not yet approved for your particular condition by the FDA.  You can ask for it, anyway: after all, you are DYING, for Christ’s sake!  Usually the FDA will say “yes” – but not always, as this article makes clear. 

So read the article and see if, like me, it makes you a little bit angry and more than a little bit depressed.

Maybe it’s the gloomy weather outside, and maybe it’s the fact that my hip is hurting – but one passage here almost brought me to tears.   It concerns a clinical trial of the drug preconaril, which was tested as a remedy for sepsis caused by enterovirus – in babies.  It is stated that it cut the risk of death to 23%, compared to 43% in a placebo-controlled comparison group.  I couldn’t help but imagine how I would have felt if my new great grandson Finnegan had been chosen for the control group.  These decisions - placebo or the real stuff - often are made by a computer and may be "double blind", meaning that the person administering the treatment doesn't know what the patient is getting.  I surmise that this is vital to medical sanity: imagine having to give a baby a sugar pill and instead of something that might save its life.  God help us if computers ever develop a conscience.

I will scare up a cheery picture to banish all this gloom.