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from the seems-better-then-what-we-are-doing-now dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
An immunotherapy drug has been described as a potential "game-changer" in promising results presented at the European Cancer Congress.
In a study of head and neck cancer, more patients taking nivolumab survived for longer compared with those who were treated with chemotherapy. In another study, combining nivolumab with another drug shrank tumours in advanced kidney cancer patients.
Immunotherapy works by harnessing the immune system to destroy cancer cells.
Advanced head and neck cancer has very poor survival rates.
In a trial of more than 350 patients, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 36% treated with the immunotherapy drug nivolumab were alive after one year compared with 17% who received chemotherapy. Patients also experienced fewer side effects from immunotherapy.
The benefits were more pronounced in patients whose tumours had tested positive for HPV (human papillomavirus). These patients survived an average of 9.1 months with nivolumab and 4.4 months with chemotherapy.
Normally, this group of patients, with advanced or treatment-resistant tumours, are expected to live less than six months.
Early data from a study of 94 patients with advanced kidney cancer showed that the double hit of nivolumab and ipilimumab resulted in a significant reduction in the size of tumours in 40% of patients. Of these patients, one in 10 had no sign of cancer remaining. This compares with 5% of patients showing tumour reduction after standard therapy.
[...] As yet, nivolumab has only been approved for treating skin cancer and in June it became one of the fastest medicines ever approved for NHS use, in combination with ipilimumab, for the same cancer. Nivolumab and ipilimumab both work by interrupting the chemical signals that cancers use to convince the immune system they are healthy tissue.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @04:05PM
The math is not nearly that obvious or clean. I'm going to be making up numbers, but consider the following.
Cost to treat disease is $10000
Cost to prevent the disease is $1
Cost to diagnose somebody potentially has the disease is $1 (say it has a 90% accuracy rate)
Percentage of the population which gets the disease is 1/100000
So yes, for a person who has the disease it would have been substantially cheaper to get the preventative treatment. However, for society as a whole, there are so many false-positives, cost for diagnosis, and costs of treatment it is actually not worth it to do. This is not including the side-effects of the preventative treatments (chances of complications, people feeling bad from the medicine, etc.)
Likewise for the power plants, if somebody told the power plant company that a disaster would occur, I guarantee they'd have built the wall. However, there are thousands (?) of power plants, almost all of which never have a problem. You need to draw a line somewhere where to accept risk. The world is a dangerous place, and if you try for a 100% perfectly safe world, you'll end up spending far too much expense.
For an example, see the efforts of the TSA, the attempts of the government to install backdoors into all systems, etc. After all, "if we can save just one life, it's worth it"... isn't it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @06:28PM
"For an example, see the efforts of the TSA, the attempts of the government to install backdoors into all systems, etc. After all, "if we can save just one life, it's worth it"... isn't it?"
Those are... outrageously bad examples. The security theater has absolutely nothing to do with (attempts to get) actual security and absolutely everything to do with money, control and the appearance of "doing something". You can't use those as examples of excessive spending for almost no benefits if the benefits weren't in the plans to begin with.
I do agree with your general point though - it's just that your example was bad. You should've used a car metaphor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @03:35AM