So what are the real costs of drugs today?
It’s unlikely you won’t have found yourself shocked these last few days by the story of the ex-hedge fund manager who bought the rights to a so-called ‘HIV drug’ and then “gouged” the price per pill from $13.50 to a staggering $750. What you may have missed, though, is that something very similar was happening at almost exactly the same time to an old second-line TB drug. In this case it was hiked from US$500 for 30 tablets to $10,800 as the drug changed hands from Purdue to
... but then we'd never heard of Chuuk ...
If you know anything about TB you’ll be well aware that good news in the field of MDR-TB is hard to find. In fact we’d never really heard much at all - but then nor had we heard of Chuuk. Chuuk is one of several US-affiliated island states among the so-called Federated States of Micronesia in the western Pacific. (It’s also, incidentally, one of the last places on earth where you can find the traditional Pacific master navigators who can make safe landfalls at distant oceanic
