Interessant vinkel på den pågående USA debat vedr. medicinpriser og "price hiking":
"Yesterday we learned an important lesson from Martin Shkreli, the dude whose start-upraised the price on a much-needed medication by more than 5,000%. The lesson is: Don't do that. But even crazier than the cost (and Shkreli's questionable assurance that this is the right thing to do) is the illness that drug is needed to treat — a personality-altering parasitic infection called toxoplasmosis.
If you know anything about toxoplasmosis, it's probably that you can get it from your pet cat. It's estimated that nearly a quarter of us in the States have been infected with the parasite,Toxoplasma gondii, which your kitty may unintentionally eat in animals she's killed. Then, you can get a whiff of it in his or her feces when you clean out the litter box and accidentally inhale litter dust (or if it gets on your hands and you don't wash them: bad idea). But you can also get it from contaminated soil and undercooked meat.
Once you've been exposed, the parasite can affect your brain, lungs, liver, and heart. For most of us, symptoms are either nonexistent or mild, consisting mainly of flu-like body aches and a fever. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), these symptoms usually last for a few weeks and resolve with or without treatment, sometimes leaving the parasite dormant inside your body indefinitely. (Note: Ny forskning viser at TG er aktiv i hele sit livsforløb)
However, for people with weakened immune systems (often pregnant women or those with HIV/AIDS), toxoplasmosis can become a much more serious — even deadly — problem. Symptoms here can include seizures as well as vision and lung problems. And, although the infection isn't normally transmitted between people, pregnant women can pass it on to their babies. This can cause some scary stuff for the child, including diseases affecting the nervous system.
So, to beat the infection, doctors usually give patients a combination of antibiotics andDaraprim (generic version: pyrimethamine). Which is why the aforementioned price hike on Daraprim is such a big deal — the drug can save the lives of some of our most medically vulnerable patients.".... more at link.
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