Crying children have milk to eat: ice bucket relay

Source: U.S - Chinese medicine source August 20, 2014 [news event]: Recently, a whirlwind of ice bucket challenge has been blowing in the United States The initiator hopes to arouse people's attention to ALS through this game Celebrities from all walks of life have poured ice water into the top NBA basketball stars, Zuckerberg, gates, Ballmer and cook have been invited to participate in the war At present, the challenge letter has been sent to the president of the United States, but Obama has not yet responded Ice bucket challenge is a social public welfare activity that the United States hopes to attract more people to pay attention to ALS disease and donate money to ALS association through the influence of celebrities If the invited participants pour ice water and upload videos, they can name the other three good people to continue the relay Otherwise, they need to donate $100 to ALS Association for disease prevention and control [drug source analysis]: ALS disease, the full name is "amyotrophic lateral sclerosis", also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, because Lou Gehrig, a famous player of the New York Yankees baseball team, died of this disease in the 1930s The clinical manifestation of the disease is nerve cell necrosis leading to muscle atrophy leading to respiratory failure The pathogenesis of ALS is unknown, and only 10% of ALS is related to heredity, so it is difficult to develop new drugs for ALS In the past 10 years, only a dozen drugs have entered the clinical practice, and almost all of them have been destroyed The farthest to go is the dexramipexole of BCD, which failed in phase III clinical trials at the beginning of last year ALS is a very serious disease, the survival time after diagnosis is only 2-5 years 0.5 of the world's population has ALS, and 30 thousand of the US population is not due to low incidence rate, but because of high mortality The famous American TV program "60 minutes" once introduced the disease, which was very frightening It's a disease you don't want to get even with the person you hate the most, so it's okay to vigorously promote it However, this ice bucket relay reflects the major social problem which disease should be solved first under the Limited R & D resources It's not hard for pharmaceutical companies, which disease can make money first, but the problem is that pharmaceutical companies are only part of the whole chain At the beginning of the last century, there was not enough money for cancer research and development in the United States to buy Sunday's Olive ball tickets But then Albert Lasker, an American businessman who founded the prestigious Lasker prize, told organizations struggling to fund cancer research that there was a place where money was unlimited: the U.S Congress Later, the National Cancer Institute was established with the participation of Congress, and now cancer receives more than its share of the burden of disease The coming October is breast cancer month in the United States Even NBA and NFL Jerseys have pink standards It's not that breast cancer is a trivial disease, but als is also fatal, even more deadly, but the funding is very limited The recent outbreak of Ebola virus has caused many people to attack the pharmaceutical industry, saying that the pharmaceutical industry looks down on people because Africa has no money to develop vaccines and drugs, although Glaxo is about to start the clinical application of Ebola vaccine In fact, there are many diseases that have a much greater impact than Ebola Now there are 350 million depressive patients and 24 million schizophrenic patients in the world, causing 2.5 trillion dollars of losses to the society every year, which is the second major disability factor in the world However, due to the difficulties in development and low drug prices, large pharmaceutical groups have withdrawn from these fields These patients and their families also hope that R & D resources will be inclined to these areas This creates a situation where crying children have milk to eat Although pharmaceutical companies will choose the areas with the greatest return, the government's scientific research funds, preferential policies for the approval of different drugs (such as orphan drugs), R & D tax credit, patent compensation and other policies can play a very guiding role Especially in the country of universal health insurance, the government also has a great say in drug price, which plays a decisive role in the direction of drug research So in the present multimedia era, the movement of relay to this kind of ice bucket will emerge in endlessly in the future.