SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for chromas
A Once-a-Month Birth Control Pill Is Coming
Unless, that is, you embed them in a flexible silicon ninja star that folds up neatly into pill form.
That's the solution a team led by scientists at Brigham and Women's Hospital and MIT came up with about five years ago. Back then they were building slow-release pills designed to deliver treatments for malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV. But in a scientific first, they've now demonstrated that the same invention can also deliver a steady drip of contraceptive hormones in the body of a pig for up to 29 days.
"From an engineering aspect, the key novelty is the ability to deliver a drug for a month after a single ingestion event," says Giovanni Traverso, a gastroenterologist and biomedical engineer at Brigham and Women's and MIT, who co-authored the new study, published today in Science Translational Medicine. The proof-of-concept experiments were conducted late last year. Since then, the long-lasting contraceptive has begun to be commercially developed by a Boston-area company called Lyndra Therapeutics, which Traverso cofounded with MIT bioengineer Robert Langer in 2015. In July, the startup received $13 million from the Gates Foundation to advance the monthly pill to human trials, with a focus on bringing it to low- and middle-income countries.
A once-a-month oral contraceptive, Science Translational Medicine (DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aay2602)
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Wednesday December 11 2019, @03:57PM (2 children)
The second link states:
Those who would benefit most from such drugs are frequently the ones least likely to accept them in the first place.
The people in many of these countries don't trust their own governments, and with good reason.
In addition many of those same people don't trust foreign health workers anymore either due to phony CIA operations.
So how are you going to convince these people that this is safe, effective and real?
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @11:27PM (1 child)
In many ways, it depends on what they are taking. It is sort of like any medical denialism in that it is a lot easier to deny the evidence-based medicine when people aren't dying/sick around you. So with things like Polio vaccination in Pakistan, Ebola treatment in DRC, or blood transfusions in the USA, you can safely ignore the problems because you don't see them. And if there is a flare up after the workers leave, then it is easy to blame them for causing the very thing they are trying to prevent. However, when you have an active outbreak killing your friends, family, and tribe, suddenly things look very different. That, and actually seeing the medicine work, is how most people get convinced in these situations.
This also has a benefit where, unlike other daily pills for things like Malaria, you don't have to have subsistence farmers meter out the doses for a month at a time, or stretching pills, just plain forgetting due to their daily subsistence farming grind, etc. So you can, basically, ensure compliance in most of the population due to the periodic pass-throughs of aide workers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 12 2019, @04:18AM
It has nothing to do with 'denialism'. One of the examples he specifically referenced, without stating, Pakistan. Do you know how we located Bin Laden? The CIA ran 'vaccination clinics' where they were mass harvesting DNA, looking to find people related to him, and then spying on them. Suffice to say that Pakistani views on Bin Laden were somewhat different than American views on him, and 'vaccine clinics' led to what would be perceived as his extrajudicial assassination. You're going to have a hell of a hard time pushing for more vaccine clinics in Pakistan now. We did even worse stateside with the Tuskegee experiment, offering people free 'medical treatment' and then running medical experiments on them, including infecting some with syphilis and then withholding the treatment (penicillin) even after it was discovered, to continue research. Yay government!
Similarly take the Orthodox Jews in NYC. They get a pass in the media for reasons one can only imagine, but are one of the most concentrated groups of unvaccinated peoples - and indeed one of the common spots for outbreaks. But they choose not to vaccinate because they feel it goes against their religion and do not have an issue with the potential fatal consequences of not doing such. The caricature of 'denialism' portrayed by our media is extremely inaccurate even for the west, but it's just completely and wholly inappropriate for regions outside the US. People don't seem to understand that mindsets change radically between groups.