Ooops

Unfortunately, that's one of the things that intuitively makes sense (that immune system tolerance to the cold virus might neutralize the T-cell response to the piggypacked HIV). It's very disturbing that this wasn't considered by anyone during the planning stages of this research, or that the assumptions seem to have been made that such immunotolerance would not be a factor. More than very disturbing, in fact.
 
uscitizen said:
Yeah and Dano keeps telling me what a great job the market driven drug industry is doing.
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yeah, cause all those drugs you old timers use every day came to market without any mistakes or prototypes. I would guess that for every drug currently on the market there are at least 10 that didn't make it.
 
Superfreak said:
yeah, cause all those drugs you old timers use every day came to market without any mistakes or prototypes. I would guess that for every drug currently on the market there are at least 10 that didn't make it.
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More than that! And remember, we have one horrible oversight to thank for the extent of our current pretesting, and for the awareness that drugs can affect fetuses in utero: Thalidomide.
 
yeah but we seem to have forgotten the Thalimde lesson Thorn....

Now we have pills that women are not even supposed to touch!
 
uscitizen said:
yeah but we seem to have forgotten the Thalimde lesson Thorn....

Now we have pills that women are not even supposed to touch!
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That's right. I'd say that this is the result of a growth in our knowledge and understanding of pharmacology and pharmacokinetics, not forgetting the lesson. It's because of thalidomide that women who "are or may become pregnant" are cautioned against using so many OTC drugs, for instance. Before that tragedy nobody considered that anything the mother ingested might have damaging effects on the development of the baby.

Similarly, far more attention has been paid to side effects and to effects on specific groups of people. The really sad thing is that it's not always possible to forsee what an effect might be on a vulnerable population until something actually happens.
 
Thorn said:
Unfortunately, that's one of the things that intuitively makes sense (that immune system tolerance to the cold virus might neutralize the T-cell response to the piggypacked HIV). It's very disturbing that this wasn't considered by anyone during the planning stages of this research, or that the assumptions seem to have been made that such immunotolerance would not be a factor. More than very disturbing, in fact.
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LOL, "Intuitively"? Well, I'll trust your judgement because I really have no idea how it works. But that's awful, those people obviously thought they were safe.
 
Thorn said:
That's right. I'd say that this is the result of a growth in our knowledge and understanding of pharmacology and pharmacokinetics, not forgetting the lesson. It's because of thalidomide that women who "are or may become pregnant" are cautioned against using so many OTC drugs, for instance. Before that tragedy nobody considered that anything the mother ingested might have damaging effects on the development of the baby.

Similarly, far more attention has been paid to side effects and to effects on specific groups of people. The really sad thing is that it's not always possible to forsee what an effect might be on a vulnerable population until something actually happens.
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Whoah. What drug is this? What did I miss?
 
LadyT said:
LOL, "Intuitively"? Well, I'll trust your judgement because I really have no idea how it works. But that's awful, those people obviously thought they were safe.
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I know, and it wasn't the measles they were being infected with; this is likely to kill them. Perhaps my understanding of the process is really retrospective, in that as it was covered, I read it and with a great forehead-slapping said to myself, "Of course!", then filled in the rest of the blanks for myself. But it does seem to me that though we know little, really, about the common cold, the knowledge of a certain tolerance to the virus seems to have been known and should have been considered.
 
LadyT said:
Whoah. What drug is this? What did I miss?
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Thalidomide. It was prescribed during the 1950s to pregnant women for morning sickness. The children born to those women had deformities that resembled flippers instead of arms and legs, and other problems as well. We now know that morning sickness generally occurs very early in the pregnancy, most often during the third month, when the development of the fetus is at perhaps its most crucial stage. We also now know that Thalidomide inhibits the growth of vasculature, which is one way that it worked to inhibit limb growth in developing fetuses.

Decades later, after the mechanism of action was determined, thalidomide again came to the fore as a potential treatment for certain types of malignant tumors, which depend for their growth on a rapidly developing blood supply. Inhibit that blood supply and you can starve the tumor. So far as I know this treatment is still in the testing stage and probably will be effective against only a few types of tumors. It was devastating, however, on a generation of babies.
 
Thorn said:
Thalidomide. It was prescribed during the 1950s to pregnant women for morning sickness. The children born to those women had deformities that resembled flippers instead of arms and legs, and other problems as well. We now know that morning sickness generally occurs very early in the pregnancy, most often during the third month, when the development of the fetus is at perhaps its most crucial stage. We also now know that Thalidomide inhibits the growth of vasculature, which is one way that it worked to inhibit limb growth in developing fetuses.

Decades later, after the mechanism of action was determined, thalidomide again came to the fore as a potential treatment for certain types of malignant tumors, which depend for their growth on a rapidly developing blood supply. Inhibit that blood supply and you can starve the tumor. So far as I know this treatment is still in the testing stage and probably will be effective against only a few types of tumors. It was devastating, however, on a generation of babies.
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This is why I'm scared to take anything other than Ibuprofen or aspirin. I had to take steroids once and I had really weird things happen to me. That was enough.
 
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